


Blue Skies

by baehj2915, marourin



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: 1920s slang, Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Angst, Deception, Epistolary, Honesty, Internalized Homophobia, Jazz Age, M/M, Multi, Mutant Rights, Organized Crime, Period Appropriate Prejudices, Romance, mild drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-01-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 09:27:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 47,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/660372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baehj2915/pseuds/baehj2915, https://archiveofourown.org/users/marourin/pseuds/marourin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the tail end of the 1920s, the Twentieth Century is finally changing for the better. When Charles and Erik meet, it seems like an appropriate expression of the zeitgeist--a confluence of passion, romance, and change. But the good times never last. Erik and Charles have to discover if they can weather the gray days together, or at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I was blue, just as blue as I could be

**Author's Note:**

> First, all my thanks and love has to go to marou, who helped me greatly through the difficult finishing process, and who made all this amazing art. I was really blown away and she deserves all the kind comments you can dish up. 
> 
> Second, thanks to spicedpiano and all the many people in chat for the endless rounds of word wars. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be done. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoy the read. 
> 
> ~*~

 

 

 

 

 

_“Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.”_

Letters, Delivered and Read

 

_January 2nd, 1931_

 

My Dearest Charles,

Upon reflection, I should’ve known I was headed for disaster when I met you, my darling. Well, my whole life, but mostly when I met you. My Bubbe had always told me a happy life was a simple life. And she was right.

I was never happier than when I living in our little cottage, your husband. We were tucked away from the rest of the world, without responsibilities or worries. However, away from the world is not the way to live. It’s impossible. The world is full of trouble. The world is full of downtrodden creatures like us, in need of help we can give them. And it isn’t our place to hide ourselves away from the trouble. No matter how happy we were.

I have come to understand the reasons why you behaved as you did. I have even come to understand better the age-old love poetry you loved to spout at me. When we had each other anything and everything seemed possible. Now I enjoy life half as much as I did when we were angry at each other and fighting, yet still together.

Yesterday’s letter startled me. Not hearing directly from you for so long created a shell around me wherein nothing could reach me. I feel moved for the first time in a long while. Below my discontent and anger, I missed you. That rose to the surface with your letter. I am overcome.

Part of me is still angry with you for sacrificing honesty in order to do what you thought would keep me safe. As mutants, unsure in this world, our lives are bound to be always filled with trials and danger.

That part of me, however, has never diminished the love I feel for you.

You brought me out of my loneliness. You told me I deserved more than anger and fighting for scraps. I want the same for you. I want more for you. I want everything for us, together. I want the world to not only wonder at our power, but to writhe in jealousy at the immensity of our love for each other. I want their recognition, their respect, because if the world were a sensible place it would have to be given.

I want people to say your name with the most romantic reverence because they must, given what I feel for you.

I want to hear people saying, “I wish anyone loved me as much as Max loved Charles.”

I still want equality. I want to say that I am a Jew, a homosexual, and a mutant—and say it without thinking what anyone else might say or do against me. I want the freedom not to fear for my loved ones. I have always known I shouldn’t have to feel shame for who I am. No one ever beat it out of me, no matter how hard the beatings. I don’t simply want these things; I demand them, for they are my right.

I want the same for all mutants.

I’m not one to regret—and don’t mistake me, Charles, there is much I don’t—but more than anything I regret our parting. I regret the mistakes we both made. I regret your lying to me. I experience more pain in your absence than any other pain I have felt.

If I were able to change the past, I might live my life very differently. I might end the hate towards me and all of my kind. I might take back the terrible things I did as a young man. I might give my mother more life than she had. I might give myself a life of ease. The fault in all that is those things gave me you.

And I would never change you. I would never exclude you, for good or ill. You have surpassed what good or ill I have now.

With this school you want to make, we have another opportunity before us. We can create a life for young mutants that we never had. We can make a place for mutants that humans must respect. But you can probably guess what excites me most, despite myself, is the second chance we have at our life.

I forgive you. I love you. I need you back with me.

Your beloved,  
Max 

 

 

 

_“Returns—suggests—convicts—enchants—Then—flings in Paradise”_

The Summer of 1928

 

In my youth I was one of the millions of immigrant children of New York, unnoticed and disdained. As I aged into adulthood, I learned to hate the world I lived in and fight back at it in the only ways given to me. I became a criminal—a no good tough. I was the hood nice folks saw in a two dollar suit waiting with sharp smile and a lead pipe at the end of an alley. Burning down the world one matchstick at a time.

Then I met Charles Xavier.

Charles didn’t only change my life he transmogrified it. I didn’t find my ambition until him. I didn’t know motivation or love or myself until I met him. He came in like a whirlwind, like a blaze, and went out the same way.

The story of my life is the story of him, so that is where I begin.

It took no less than two meetings with Charles Xavier to know that I was stuck.

The first time I saw him was during Emma’s swank shindig at her beach house. Her exact role in Shaw’s employ was always obscure, purposefully I wouldn’t doubt. Her name and any buildings in her name usually served as a front for less legitimate business. Her name, and wealth, was seen as beyond reproach. It was perhaps predictable that I didn’t like her. I tolerated her because she was a mutant sister, but that was possibly the only thing we had in common. She was one of those rich people entombed in their own wealth. She had the audacity to call summering at her one of her family’s smaller homes _slumming_. Sometimes I hated them so much it was hard to breathe. I hated that I knew those people. People that could ignore their manicured gardens and chandeliers and servants-on-hand and trays and trays of food that would never be eaten, only to say it was the least of their offerings. But it came with the work.

Past the tables of roast lamb, roast fish, cold tomato soups, potatoes hollandaise, asparagus au gratin, tiny lily-white bread sandwiches, bright vegetable terrines, sculptured mounds made out of exotic fruits, and mountains of ice cream surrounded by ice—past the statued servants dressed like Turks guarding the shrubbery, past the blotto socialites swilling gin martinis, past the din of dozens of social climbers trying to reach them was the patio.

He was sitting there at the piano and I almost didn’t see him.

I think about that moment a lot. About what might have happened if my eyes kept skimming over the finery and the vulgarity and if they had never stopped until I got fed up and left.

But I did. I paused at the way he didn’t quite fit.

He was wearing a thin blue cotton jacket and worn Russian style shirt—the kind with no collar for a tie and tied at the side. Surely an homage to the recent fad of loving everything Slavic in design. His hair was dark brown, loose and un-pomaded on his head. And he was bearded.

He looked like a tramp. Or a Bolshevik.

My first instinct was to think he was a gatecrasher—and wonder how he hadn’t been thrown out on his ear yet—but he was playing the piano, undisturbed, with a pleased little grin on his face. Then I thought it would make much more sense for him to be kind of hanger-on to the privileged class, donning the apparel of the under classes. Making poverty fashionable. It was the usual extent to which the rich lent support to progress. When fashionable, at least.

But his eyes caught mine and I wished like hell that I could’ve looked away or moved on. But he looked at me with sober, prying eyes, a chilling flash of blue, and smiled.

It was the smile of someone who knew something.

I feared I might’ve frozen, staring at him for hours, if Emma hadn’t taken that moment to sidle up to me. It might’ve been convenient if finding me were ever at someone’s convenience. They found me because there was a must.

“Howdy, bagman,” she said, her face as blank as ever during these sorts of proceedings. “I knew I’d find you on the outskirts.”

She sparkled, as per usual. Diamonds around her neck and in her ears. Her hair was in waves to the side and that sweet, sad Clara Bow eye make up, though she was more vamp than Clara could ever be.

I pointed at the man at the piano, careful not to look directly at him again. “This new entertainment for the swells? Come, gaze upon the ivory-tickling Socialist. A dime a dance; two bits’ll get you _The Internationale_.”

She gave me that unimpressed look, but paused and moved in sharp, like she caught the scent of a fresh kill.

My guts tightened. I never liked the sensation of being measured up.

“That’s Charles. I’m surprised you’ve not met him. Absolutely everybody knows Charles. And he’s more of a conversation piece than a communist.” After a beat, she added, “Does he catch your eye?”

I turned my mind into the sharpest thing I could imagine. It probably didn’t stop her much, but I refused to make it easier for her.

“I was just wondering how your delicate sensibilities could tolerate any tarnishing of the décor.”

“Sugar, I wouldn’t have bothered with the party if I’d known what kind of décor would win you over.”

I clenched my fist to keep from saying or doing something stupid, but I could feel nails and table legs and the iron of the gate pulling in to me.

“I have a job to do.”

She smirked and motioned to garden gate, which Janos was already opening for me, having come at Emma’s silent beckon. It led through the garden to the private entrance of the house. In the cellar, Ludovitch and his payment were waiting for me.

“Then go do it,” she said.

I walked away determined not to look at the piano player again.

I didn’t succeed.

Janos led me to the wine cellar. There was a pantry of cold, dry good, but rows of green-dark glasses stacked high to the low ceiling. Ludovitch had a speakeasy that was enjoying a surge in popularity, which Shaw covered for booze and craps. He was twitchy when he saw me. It used to be that guys got twitchy when they were low on their cut, but it seemed like lately everyone was twitchy around me. My reputation had advanced somewhat. It kinda slayed me that those schmucks were afraid of me, when I never paid any mind to killing them. That was all Shaw’s decision. He had the grin of a snake oil salesman and less honest than a politician, but he handed out a few free drinks or a throw every once in a while and they thought he was a swell guy.

I pointed to the carpetbag at his feet. “All there?”

He nodded, trying badly not to eye the door too much. Janos was standing by it with a smirk.

“Pick it up and open it,” I said.

He looked confused, but scrambled for it, opening the mouth for me. I looked around at the stacks of money, picked up one and flipped through the corners for a quick count. It felt like the right amount, but I wasn’t a money guy. I pulled the bag from him and tucked it under my arm.

“We’ll be in touch.”

The man sputtered for a second. “That’s it? That’s all?”

“You get your coffin varnish on the 12th.”

“I thought you were gonna…”

“I’m not here to jaw with you.” I pointed a thumb at the door. “Dry up.”

“But what about the feds?”

That had me for a loss. I stopped. “What do you mean?”

“The… One of Beatty’s men was sayin’ there were agents from the federal government looking into bootlegging. Closin’ down clubs. Madden says in Hell’s Kitchen they’re getting pinched left and right—”

“I suggest you don’t listen to gossip, Mr. Ludovitch. As I said, we’ll be in touch. Now, scram.”

He hesitated for a moment, but finally left.

“Es eso cierto?” Janos said, hovering by the door.

I shrugged, pulling my cigarette case out of my breast pocket.

There was always talk about the federal government trying to shut down bootlegging rackets. Considering how many City officials we bribed on a weekly basis, I sincerely doubted anything would ever happen but a few minor busts every now and again. It wasn’t like anyone from Shaw’s crew was ever going to be arrested, or stay arrested. How do you keep a teleporter or a man who can create cyclones out of his hands in the tank? For my own part, I didn’t think any amount of iron bars could keep me locked up. There was even a small, itching desire lurking somewhere in the back of my mind to be arrested. Just so I could finally show the world what I would do to those cell doors. Just so I could finally be free of those constraints that didn’t mean anything to what I was.

I let Janos grub a cigarette. As I often did, not a little because Janos was good-looking. I wondered frequently if he knew I used these opportunities to watch the movement of his jaw and throat. Then again if he did notice, I doubt he’d say anything. The rest of Shaw’s team did little to question me as they’d seen me wield a few too many triggers and a few too many lead pipes with proficiency.

While normally I would be occupied noticing Janos—obsessively cataloging male features—I was drawn to thinking of the blue-eyed man at the piano. Charles, and the cheeky glint in his eyes. There was something dynamic about him that appealed to the cursed side of me. Janos may well have been better looking, something clear and fine like a Prince Charming, but he would never look at me like Emma’s piano player had.

I never wanted to trouble over a stranger’s eyes or smile, but it was all that I had. Charles’ face stayed with me long after those few moments I had seen him. I would reconstruct his face like a puzzle in my mind, assembling the right hues and shapes, the texture of his beard, the motion of his neck. The most important part was the intent in his eyes, which I admit to not getting right most of the time, colored in various shades of coldness and keenness.

It was not uncommon for me to have this lingering obsession with the faces and bodies of men I did not know. I wasn’t one of those queers who had no idea why their bodies betrayed them or had endless amounts of loathing for those attractions. I knew who I was. And the biggest problem I had with being a fag were the secrets I had to keep.

But Charles, whom everybody knew except me because I was a nobody, a nameless Jew with immigrant parents from the Lower East Side, haunted me for weeks. I might have forgotten him, or confused him with an endless blur of pale, beautiful faces in the endless crowds I moved through. However, fate knows my name. Almost of a need created from my own desires, I saw him again.

The second time was at The Caspartina, one of Shaw’s bigger clubs. The joint was filled with his retinue, but mostly their hangers-on and the men of competing business. I was there to “keep the peace,” meaning if things were to get out of hand I should break a few heads, waiting for Shaw to get back from a meeting.

I had to stop in my tracks seeing him at the piano on stage to check he wasn’t a delusion. He was dressed a little better this time in a worn gray waistcoat, a cornflower blue tie, and a dingy collar. His hair looked darker then, combed back with pomade. And his beard was trimmed down neat and more fashionable, exposing more of his youthful face.

As if feeling my gaze on him, he looked up surprised for a moment, and then grinned his knowing grin.

Whatever crisis might have occurred over the next hour or so would never have garnered my attention. It was like the world was a radio and all the sound had been turned down. I paced through the crowded room, trying to distract myself. Normally I’d work the room, trying to figure out what mood of the room and what hoods from other outfits were doing. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Charles. I watch his fingers glide across the keys, his private little smiles, the way he’d glance over the crowd.

The way he’d glance over me.

 

 

Finally he was replaced by a dark-skinned chanteuse I’d seen before, mostly at Shaw’s other clubs. I waited for him to return from the back, where performers did whatever they did after the shows. I had a nervous impulse to talk to him, but I didn’t know what to say. It was like a riot of electricity in my chest.

I couldn’t be certain his returning looks meant anything. But I’d felt so sure, having gotten a similar look from other three-letter fellas. The knowing smile, a keen eye. I labored over how to go through the crowd, how to look for him with feigned nonchalance, and what to say to him. While I pondered, away from the spotlights, he was finding me.

A hand barely pressed on my shoulder before I turned, feeling for metal. But there was none. Just Charles’ blue-sky eyes glittering under the club’s lights. The band was playing something jazzy and alive, and people’s feet were hammering out a rhythm on the dance floor, but I was used to making out conversation over the din.

“…at Emma’s do last month?”

I panicked, suddenly hateful that I was frozen. I was behaving like some star struck bug-eyed Betty meeting Valentino. I nodded.

“You’re with the house?” He near-yelled.

I nodded again.

“Something tells me you’re not with the band.”

For the first time in a long time I was worried about how almost anyone could tell from looking I was a hired thug. Nobody who wasn’t needed a three-piece suit and a gat to run errands and guard closed doors.

But Charles smiled again. Close up it was even more intoxicating, soft and warm red, but a little sly.

He pointed to the bar and I followed wordlessly like a little duckling.

“Two whiskeys,” he said, commanding Alex’s attention faster than usual with the size of that night’s crowd.

“The good stuff,” I added, reasonably glad to know I could still talk.

“Thanks for that. It seems like every place has a different sort of code for procuring something that wasn’t made in someone’s bathtub.”

“You’re actually a limey,” I blurted. Now that we were over by the bar at the back of the house it was quieter and I could hear.

He smiled. “Pardon?”

I sighed. “It’s just… I thought I was imagining—I thought you looked English.”

His nose flared in a laugh. “Goodness, I’m not sure if I find a compliment in that.”

“Like a painting,” came rolling out of my mouth before I could stop. I almost walked out of the joint then and there. “I mean you look like someone in a painting I’ve seen. It was a… a limey painter.”

I looked swiftly out at the crowd of partygoers and hoped someone was starting a fight somewhere so I could take him out back and beat the crap out of him. No such luck. Alex returned with our drinks, so I had to look back at him. It was like he could see through me. Not ignoring me, like Emma did, but like he could see to the soul of me.

He took his drink in hand, fingers curling up to the rim. “It’s not the only thing people have thought I looked like.”

“What you look like?”

He nodded, taking a sip and cringing a little. It wasn’t Shaw’s back room, and production had been down due to increased heat from the cops, so it wasn’t his nicest hooch.

“A Socialist?”

That made him laugh. It was very nice sound.

“That too. Do you often get gentlemen telling you what you look like?”

I took a swig of my whiskey to hide any reaction. Taking a look around, no one seemed to be too close or lingering in any way.

“You mean other than a torpedo?” I said, not keeping the sneer out of my voice.

“You don’t look particularly thuggish to me. All the gangsters you see in the papers look rather mean and meager. And they all have squashed noses for some reason.”

I laughed, unable to help myself, but I could hear the edge of anxiety in it. I needed to know what this man was doing to me, or at least get away from him. He was so disarming, which was dangerous. There were far, far too many things I couldn’t let people see. I couldn’t afford to be disarmed.

“I don’t look like anything.”

Something switched in his face and the carriage of his shoulders, but it was difficult to identify. Charles gave me an oddly sympathetic look. “If you say so.”

His words made me feel like breaking glass. He was all but inviting me to some back room or a flophouse somewhere. And I was turning him away. I didn’t want to, but he was playing at Shaw’s club and Emma’s parties. Somehow he was in Shaw’s circle. I couldn’t. And it wasn’t like he could say anything about me when he was the one who opened the line of conversation.

Charles drank down the rest of his glass and banged it on the table with finality, and an alacrity that betrayed his soft-spoken limey accent.

“Listen, I’m going up to Harlem. Jimmy Johnson is playing at The Casino and I can’t possibly miss it. I’m meeting some people, but you’re welcome come along. In fact I insist.”

My chest tightened. I wanted to spend time with him, follow him anywhere. It’d been a long time since I felt that for anyone.

“I’ve got work to do here,” I said. It was true, but it felt like an excuse. It felt like I was already missing something.

Charles gave me a look of understanding he shouldn’t have had for just meeting me. He took out his billfold, but I waved him off.

“Nix that. It’s on me.”

“No, I couldn’t—“

“Call it solidarity,” I said, feeling the bitterness in my own mouth. I washed it down with the rest of my cheap whiskey.

He looked at me dubiously, but then put his wallet back in his pocket. “You know I never told you my name.”

“I know… Emma told me.”

“Ah, Emma,” he said with a peculiar, indulgent look, like one might cast a darling rambunctious child. A look incongruous with everything I knew about Emma. “If I tell you anyway, will you return the favor?”

I nodded because there was never going to be any other possibility.

“My name is Charles. Charles Xavier.”

Some crazy part of me burned to take him by the waist and pull him into my arms and say _Max. Max Eisenhardt. Come run away with me._ It was crazy, how he was already under my skin, an itch waiting to be scratched. But where could we possibly run when there was no place to go?

“Erik Lehnsherr.”

“Delighted,” he said with a smile that seemed like he was maybe telling the truth.

He held out his hand, but before I could even think about if I really wanted to touch him and let him go, he grabbed my hand firmly, sliding his free hand around the top of mine. He squeezed, holding his thumb over my wrist. He leaned in, and I was pulled into blue eyes that never should have seemed so shrewd in a face like his.

“I will see you again, Erik Lehnsherr.”

It felt near as much of a threat as a promise. It would’ve been a lie to say I didn’t want him to make good on it.

After he left, I absentmindedly stalked the shop, gave some dice-player the bum’s rush, and waited for Shaw. There was some business to be done, but I hadn’t known what for, or who, yet. So I was left to fill the wait with reminding myself of the reasons why it didn’t matter if Charles was queer—there was no point to trying to hunt him down. I couldn’t keep him for longer than the space it would take for a tumble. I could spend the night with him, leave, and then wait for the next night to come along with the next stranger. All he could be was a fond memory.

And what’s the use of a fond memory?

I took to the distraction of Shaw’s arrival readily.

He was swiftly followed by Emma hanging off the arm of Dick Beatty, something of a rival. They’d been in talks negotiation talks for their areas of overlap—which was basically everything when it came to gangsters. They both ran nightclubs, bootleggers, and gambling. Although, Beatty dabbled in dope and hookers forming a complete circle in crime. I found it distasteful myself, but whatever rottenness could penetrate the system was fine by me. While Emma distracted Dick in her particular way, leading him to one of the rooms in back, Shaw rounded on me with his usual startling, jovial smile.

He clapped me on the shoulder, leaning in close and casual. “We’re going to finish up in back. Give us fifteen. Then you’re going to take him for a ride.”

I held in a sigh, and looked straight ahead into the crowd because he was looking at me, waiting for a reaction. He knew my opinion, but that didn’t really matter. Murdering a neighborhood boss was likely to cause more than a little brouhaha. That didn’t change my job description any.

It just meant I was in for a busy few months while Beatty’s men either tried to maintain their racket or kill Shaw—that was if I didn’t get zotzed myself.

“No problem, boss.”

“Good man,” he said with another friendly clap.

I shook off the feeling and waited, just trying not to think. Not about how I’d kill Beatty, not about where I’d stuff him, not about what I’d do if the coppers came by. Not about how Shaw was going to get me killed one of these days. And certainly not about Charles Xavier and his invasive, understanding gaze.

By the time I came back from dumping the body—one of the usual places, a disused farm out of the city and a long drive—the joint was empty but for one of old man sweeping up in the main room. And Emma, waiting for me in Shaw’s office. The man himself was gone and I wasn’t about to inquire. The less time I spent with him the better.

“Pity Azazel couldn’t do this one,” she said, reclining from the divan. She snapped her fingers and made the sound air being displaced, or whatever she thought Azazel’s disappearing trick sounded like. “I love that. Lickety-split. You always take so long.”

“Do you know what he’s thinkin’?” I said angrily over the sink, washing off the blood that had gotten on my hands from dragging the body. “’Course you do. Would you mind telling me though? Seeing as how I’m gonna be the one to get gunned down by some hood.”

She snorted a feminine laugh over her ever-present martini glass.

Of course she wouldn’t actually tell me anything. I turned to leave, but she stopped me dead in my tracks.

“You talked to Charles earlier.”

I tensed, but didn’t show her my face. I didn’t know what her angle was but it couldn’t have been wholesome. Shaw knew what I could to with metal, of course—it was why he hired me. But as far as I could tell he didn’t know I was queer. I didn’t know what he’d even do if he did know. Emma, with her gifts, obviously knew, had alluded to it a few times. She’d never exposed me outright though.

I couldn’t say why. It wasn’t like we got along terribly well.

“I thought we agreed my affairs were my own, Frost.”

“I never made any promises, Max.”

The bronze doorknob crumpled under my hand. I ripped it out of the door completely and let it wait by my side, if I needed it for anything, as I turned around to face her.

“Don’t call me that.”

She shrugged and casually put a hand up in surrender. She put her drink down to examine the varnish on her nails. “It’s only that I thought you should know… he’s a cousin, cousin.”

The doorknob dropped to the floor.

“He’s a mutant,” I said, feeling the words on my tongue like a cloying liqueur.

She made a grunt of disgust and sighed. “Ugh, I hate that word. He’s like us, darling. He’s one of the homme nouveau.”

I just stood there, paralyzed. I felt dizzy with options. For the first time in my life it felt like the closed door I’d been living behind was opened.

It was terrifying.

Emma rose regally from the divan and moved to leave, but stopped before the doorway. In the entire time I’d known her she’d never leveled me with as honest a look as she had then. She looked wary and very slightly tender.

“I know him—about as well as I can, I suppose. Watch out for him.”

I’d been a sap to think she meant ‘protect him’ and not ‘protect yourself.’

 

 

 

_“A good nation I will make live. This the nation above has said. They have given me the power to make over.”_

_A Quick-and-dirty History of the Unimportant Times_

 

I was born Max Eisenhardt in the year 1900, a child of the new century, I’d been told.

I was later disappointed to find out that 1900 is in actuality the last year of the old century. Nineteen-aught-one was the first year of the subsequent epoch.

My life has been riddled with lies ever since.

One of those lies was that Jews were rich, hoarding wealth and taking work from decent Christians, setting up rackets, or worse. This was usually told to me as the reason why Jews were hated. But I grew up with my mother, my father, my Aunt Judith, and my Grandmother, who were all Jewish. We were also poor. Almost every person I knew growing up was poor and Jewish.

Everybody knew about _Jews without money_ but it was almost all of us.

We lived in a tenement on Geranos Street in the Lower East Side and it was several years before I realized not everyone in the world lived that way. That was when my parents let Aunt Judith take me out into other parts of the city so I could help her hand out pamphlets. We always went on her day off and had two stacks: one for the United Hebrew Charities and one for the New York Women’s Trade Union League.

My mother or my father occasionally went to the rallies with Aunt Judith, but not usually. They had to get the same day off. My entire childhood the worst thing I thought could happen to a person was “getting sacked” because it seemed to be the only thing adults worried about. Every time you got sacked, you got paid less at your new job. Fewer and fewer places would hire you. You couldn’t pay your rent. And you moved in with other families, or, lived under tenement stairs in the cold waiting for the coppers to chase you out.

Both my aunt and Mama were fired a few times for various reasons. Getting arrested, mouthing off to the bosses, organizing, staying home to take care of me if I was sick. But by 1910 they were both working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where they walked home to the tenement seeing limestone mansions and high society women in tulle hats and dresses that cost more than their yearly salaries.

Bubbe took in alterations from home. Papa sold apples from a cart. I went to school most of the time, a lot more than most of the kids in my tenement—my parents took school more seriously than I did and thought I was bright—but when I didn’t go I helped out Papa or Bubbe.

Then there was the fire.

The Triangle Fire. It was in all the papers. No one stopped talking about it for months. Everyone said there was going to be riots. Everyone said there was going to be hell to pay. Everyone said there was going to be unions everywhere and no one would die like that anymore.

My mother and my aunt both died trapped inside the ninth floor. The doors were locked so the women couldn’t leave until they were checked for stealing the end of the day. While the supervisors in the offices above left through the roof escape, leaving the workers behind. The entire building was filled with cotton and linen shirt pieces.

Word spread faster than the smell of char.

Later on that night in the bustle of angry voices congregating on stoops questioning what was to be done, mourning good Jewish girls, commiserating on how no one up there, no one important, could give two shits about a bunch of dead immigrants, my father cried into my hair.

“It’s going to be alright, Max,” he said.

He was a liar too.

Weeks later there was a memorial parade, where it seemed like the whole of New York City was walking in black, in solidarity, in pain. It seemed like the whole of New York City was mourning my Mama and my Aunt Judith. I walked with a sea of people, more people than I’d ever seen, in a stupor, like my soul was dragging three feet behind my body. I was drowning in a flood of muffled sound and ash.

That whole time was a blur.

I wanted everything to stop moving. I wanted to sit down and have someone explain to me why my mother was not coming back. I wanted to know why I was awake in a slow slog as people hurried around me to do other things. I wanted to know why I slept in clouds of billowing skirts and embers floating to the ground.

I wanted to know why the men who locked my family in a burning building got to go on living and working in the same city I had to inhabit. I wanted to know why there were no riots, no hell to pay. No punishment. I wanted to know where the wrath of God had gone.

Anger, not just air, filled my lungs from then on out.

I came to learn that everything was stacked against me. The world was designed to hate and buck against everything I was. I was the poor offspring of poor Jewish immigrants. And as I got older, my strange affinities started to grow, deepening my disadvantage.

The allure of metal became more and more as the new skyscrapers exploded around me. I could see them without eyes. I reached out to them as I became increasingly familiar with every sprawling corner of Manhattan. It set itself apart from mere fascination. Any yob could look up at the skyline and point, knowing they were seeing something monumental. I could feel the might of the dawning new world in my bones. I could pull metal to me, bend it to my will, and use my mind to change and temper it. In my mind I was Hephaestus, yet I couldn’t say a word because of the whispers of _new men_ and their uncanny, inhuman _mutations_ very unlike the freaks of the past.

Just as I knew without being told my affinity with metal was an aberration, I knew my feelings for other boys were forbidden as well. Sodomites, sissies, fairies, faggots, rent boys, queens. They were all figures of contempt and pity and mockery. My fear of this, my longing to be something else was actually quite short-lived.

Why bother when everything else about me was beyond the pale?

I made a fairly simple presumption from an early age that if the wider world was going to treat me with nothing but scorn, I was going to return it, not accept it.

After Mama and Aunt Judith died, getting work was a necessity. I got a job at a newsies as they were always looking for lads with energy they didn’t have to pay well. Even with my pittance we couldn’t afford our apartment and had to rent a room from the Schneidermann’s apartment, a family with six children in the building across from ours. Bubbe and I shared a bed until I was thirteen. Then I shared with Papa until he died from drink when I was fourteen.

After that I shared a bed with other borders the Schneidermanns would take in from time to time. Single young men, usually, who just moved to the country or lost a job or whose mama had too many other babies for them to live at home.

Then I stopped going to school altogether. The only education I received that was any kind of formal was from books. I may have been a thug, but I couldn’t forget how my Mother always told me to get an education. Besides, reading was one of the few things that gave me pleasure.

I started doing other work for the newsagent, like delivering packets of cash to policemen, beating up other newsboys so they couldn’t distribute, and, once or twice, setting fire to competitors’ newsstands. But mostly delivery, anything from bribes to dope. My boss got me into fencing stolen rings and necklaces to some of the Lower East Side jewelers because I spoke Yiddish. I was useful enough that I was taught how to drive so I could do work in other parts of town.

By the time I was sixteen, I knew how to run from the flatfoots and deflect bullets with my ability. I knew where to hide swag. I knew how to skim scratch without getting greedy enough to get caught. Suddenly I had a reputation. For being quiet, for being evasive, and for being good in a fight when being quiet and evasive failed.

I was a tough and everyone knew it.

I got an apartment for just my Grandmother and me. It didn’t freeze in the winter and she had her own bedroom, separate from the small sitting room. I never told her what I did, about anything, but she knew. More than just gossip, she must have known I wasn’t even a part of the world. A criminal, a reprobate, a foreigner to the people around me. She told me every day that I was going to go to jail for breaking the law, but she did it while she kissed me good-bye and wished me luck.

So maybe she was as apart from the world as I was.

I lived like that until I was twenty, fencing a small volume of stolen goods for my boss, beating up whoever needed it, and being dependable enough for a decent income without drawing more attention than the crooks around me. I easily avoided the Great War. I was too young for conscription. Even though boys my age or younger were volunteering in ridiculous fits of patriotism, or being shanghaied by their parents and block wardens, my boss kept papers on hand for me proving I was under twenty-one. And bribed War Office officials who insisted I wasn’t. It was the only part of my life as a bad man my Bubbe had encouraged. She told me if I went off to war she would die of heartbreak.

My Grandmother died in 1920 anyway. She was old and sick, and hadn’t even bothered to tell me how long she’d been feeling ill. Being poor her whole life had taken the fight out of her. I wanted to rage against something, but there was no one to face because it hadn’t been one thing that had made her older than she really was.

It was then I realized it wasn’t individual incidents that had killed my family, but a huge wall of forces people like me were never meant to overcome. A huge wall that had been built a long time before me or my parents, or my grandparents, had ever been born.

I wasn’t a communist, or even a Socialist like Aunt Judith, but their words spoke to me from the past like an echo. Things needed to change; things needed to decay. And I wanted to be part of the rot that took that wall down.

I just didn’t know that change would come with prohibition.

Suddenly there was a more crime to be had and every two-bit thug was trying to start a racket bootlegging booze. Including my boss.

So when I was heading to my distributor’s warehouse on February 10th, 1921, I walked into a bloodbath.

The warehouse was littered with a half a dozen dead bodies. Three men in suits I’d never seen before remained standing. Two of them were carrying Tommy guns. The man without a gun was wearing a fancy brown and burgundy suit and a smug face, smoking a cigar. He straightened his mustache, like I’d knocked into him on the thoroughfare.

“Waste him,” he said dispassionately.

With all the force I could muster, with my whole being, I pushed. I’d deflected bullets before, but never from a Thompson, never from two. I could barely see the fire through the rain of metal. It felt almost like being pelted by hail. It felt like the push and pull of metal was a part of my body, an extension of my arms and legs, more than it ever had been before.

When the bullets stopped, I started breathing again. I could feel my hands shaking, but I’d caught them by surprise. I ripped the guns out of their hands, sending them skidding to the floor, left with what I was going to do to cover my tracks.

But there was a soft chuckle as the man with the mustache started clapping. “Excellent,” he barked.

That was how I started working for Sebastian Shaw.

I did more or less the same thing for Shaw for the next several years, with the addition of adding murder and body disposal to my repertoire. Shaw was like me, in a way. He said those whispers about _new men_ were true. He called us mutants and said we were different than humans. He said that one day we’d create a separate society, above and apart from the people who wanted us to blend into the shadows.

Shaw was a criminal and a gangster, but he was in the business of collecting extraordinary people. He called it _appropriation of our rightful property_.

I didn’t disagree.

Shaw was an untrustworthy bastard, but he gave me my start. He believed in a new era as well as I did, if not more so. An era where mutants would gain control and run things. An era where the old divisions of race and class and religion would be unwelcome. But it would take a lot of work—a lot of wheeling and dealing—first. In an effort to both escape attention from the police and start anew, he was the one who suggested I go by a professional name.

“You’re more than a small-time Jewish tough, m’boy,” he said.

That was how I became Erik Lehnsherr.

That was how life stayed until Charles.

I’m not being remiss; I know I haven’t mentioned my dalliances with men. Of course, I had them. I had them as a boy with other boarders in the Schneiderman’s spare bed. And it shouldn’t surprise that over a decade of being a crook and a thug gave me incredibly detailed knowledge of Manhattan’s seediest corners. I knew where to go when I wanted a throw. But I don’t mention them. Hesitant, passing encounters in the dark with shame-faced men who wanted more but couldn’t or didn’t know how to voice such want. Hypocritical men who would obey the desire of their cocks, but not the desires of their hearts to ask for more than contempt, pity, and mockery.

I don’t condemn them. I was the same way before Charles. But that’s entirely the point. B.C. Before Charles, who saved me, who changed me. To talk about them in detail would be to admit they even stood on the same ground as Charles, which is patently untrue. Perhaps I’m being maudlin, but there was never any other who affected me more, good or bad.

It was with Charles I became a different man.

 

 

 

_“Permit me voyage, love, into your hands”_

_The Summer and Fall of 1928_

 

After I killed Dick Beatty, there was a short-lived turf war.

All of our disputes were relatively short-lived. The majority of Shaw’s crew had always been mutant. I’d known men to die under Shaw’s command, but the humans barely stood a chance. Certainly _how_ Shaw managed to steadily amass territory and schemes over the past few years rarely went unspoken. More often than not the whispering of Shaw’s men being devils or vicious freaks of nature usually did some of our jobs for us.

During the end of that summer, I was busy. Dodging police, disposing of bodies, stowing cash and dope and booze, and turning Beatty’s network of pimps, runners, and bagmen into our network of pimps, runners, and bagmen. It was a lot of work, even if I could disarm an entire room of hoodlums and wield a lead pipe at the same time. The days I wasn’t being Shaw’s strong-arm in July and August were filled with hiding out, waiting for a messages. Or waiting to drop whatever I was doing whenever Azazel popped in.

Or at least that’s what I should have been doing.

I had adopted a peculiar form of hiding out in the early evenings that included finding out what clubs Charles was booked for, going there in the nicer of my two good suits, and squirreling away in the back of the joint to watch him play. I never approached him, and I never saw him look directly at me, but after the first few times the barkeep would find me and give me a glass of brown on the house.

I felt like a wind-up toy doing the same tricks over and over again.

“You’re not going to too much trouble trying to find me, are you?”

My gun loosened from its holster under my arm. Sneaking up on me in a loud speakeasy was one thing; getting the drop on me in an empty alley was just embarrassing.

I’d left the building after his set. Sometimes he stayed at whatever joint he was playing at to dance and drink with the swells. Emma was right. It seemed like everybody knew him. Everywhere he went there was always some little group of people happy to see him.

I looked him over close up. His beard was still short, but fuller. And his hair was unkempt again, soft and almost russet under the light of the distant neon lights. His eyes looked less keen than usual. He was dressed more like he was going to a union rally than tickling the ivories, his dark linen jacket looked loose on his shoulders.

I shrugged and lit my cigarette, like I’d been trying to do in the first place.

“Who says I’m looking for you?”

“Well, you can’t be here for the music. I know I’m not that accomplished a pianist. And I would imagine someone looking for a good time would look happier than you do.”

I glared at him, but I was met only with a cheery grin.

“Emma told me,” he said. “You’re one of us.”

He nodded plainly, without comment, like I was asking if he had two hands with ten fingers. Even when I had joined Shaw’s crew, surrounded by people like me for the first time, none of them had been eager to confirm what they were. They’d looked wary about me for weeks before showing off what they could do. Charles’ lack of alarm was almost audacious.

“What can you do?” I asked, looking him over again. He didn’t seem to have anything physically different about him. Then again, Emma could turn into a big shiny rock, so what did I know.

“What can _you_ do?” He said, playfully.

I sighed. “I’ve met other mutants, you know. The suspense isn’t killing me,” I lied. But I pulled a handful of coins out my pocket anyway.

It was my oldest parlor trick. I tossed them in the air, but caught them mid-air, and swirled them around in a little constellation until they all piled neatly back into my hand. Charles clapped, delighted. His amusement was a refreshing, honest little look on his face. I felt a niggling impulse to do something bigger, something more extraordinary so he’d keep that face for longer. But his smile slowly slid off.

“I know, by the by.”

“You know what?”

“Know you’ve met other mutants. Obviously, but besides Emma. You work with them.”

A sudden small flare of panic rose in my chest. Did he work for Shaw in any other context than entertainment? Despite his shabby clothes, his familiarity with the swells and the way he spoke made him too chichi to be a hired gun or a bootlegger. And he certainly looked too soft and cordial to be a hood. I knew some outfits sometimes hired clever, strange little men for peculiar jobs that required more than a chopper, but we’d all been too busy with Beatty’s men for a new scheme.

I didn’t want him to be some kind of conman or part of Shaw’s crew. Desperately didn’t want it. I didn’t want him to be bad like me. I was a hypocrite, but that was the way I needed it. I wouldn’t have been able to look him in the face again if he were.

“I know because that’s what I can do.”

Then there was a gentle, swaying sensation in my head. I could recognize the feeling immediately because Emma had done it to me a dozen times, though her feeling in my head was much sharper, much firmer. Charles was a mind reader. It was an odd sort of relief to feel.

He grinned rather smugly as he spotted the recognition on my face.

_I’m a telepath, like Emma. Well, not too much like Emma. I don’t have her other astounding ability, but I can read minds and converse like this. Leave a few impressions, as she can._

Charles’ voice in my mind was even more warm and honeyed than when it was in my ear. But as smooth as it felt, I couldn’t help but think of all the terrible, forbidden things I’d done and recoil. I didn’t want Charles to see that.

“I won’t push in. I swear.”

I frowned. “How can you not? You already know I don’t want you to look.”

He shook his head. “There’s a difference between your intimate thoughts—memories, concerns, ideas and what have you—and how you feel. Feelings are more impressions than actual pictures, do you know what I mean?”

“Sure, it’s just… A man has secrets.”

“I understand. You barely know me.”

I wasn’t very happy with that. Generally, I thought that we mutants should feel free in using our gifts with one another. Telepathy shouldn’t have been different, but it was. It was more than the criminality of my secrets. For some reason, I wanted very strongly to keep them from Charles. I wanted to show him that I could be better than I really was.

“It’s not you,” I said with my cigarette between my lips, trying to look casual. “We’re mutants. We’re bound together by what we are. I’d just as soon not get you involved in… Well, you know what Shaw’s about. You seem like a decent bird.”

He looked down chastened, the good humor of his posture quickly deflating a bit. I could’ve sworn there was a bit of red to his cheeks, but I thought it away as probably having a flask on his person. A hand went through his hair as he toed the gritty pavement. It only occurred to me then that he was small in stature. He wasn’t very short, but he wasn’t tall either. And his shoulders and arms had the spareness of youth, which I hadn’t even thought to wonder about. He’d been so confident.

Thankfully, he interrupted the uneasy silence.

“Have a drink with me. Or coffee. I want to talk to you.” The corner of his mouth tugged up into a cordial half-smile. “Please.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. I wanted to. I was carrying a mighty big torch for this man. I wanted to indulge in every sin with him. But his circle ran around Emma’s. A one-night fling would be one thing if I never ran into him again. But that seemed less and less likely. There was more than one type of danger in trying to keep him around.

“I can’t. I shouldn’t be out on the town.”

Charles switched gears visibly and excitedly and said, “Are you on the lam?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Come to my apartment, then. No one would should be looking for you in Greenwich Village.”

“Do you always invite bad men you don’t know back to your place?”

“Usually only on major holidays, but I make exceptions for disreputable queers who follow me around Manhattan.”

I pinched off the end of my cigarette and put it back in its case, fighting off a tense feeling in my neck.

“You’re too cheeky for your own good, I think.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to think so, old boy.”

“Fine. You’ve twisted my arm.”

He smiled with indulgent red lips, half a laugh hiding behind them. “Ducky.”

We took a taxicab over to the Village, with Charles filling the air with friendly chatter the whole while. He was talking about Mexico for some reason. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the words, and I suppose it didn’t really matter, as Charles’ demeanor was instantly more distant and formal with the driver present. But I couldn’t concentrate for the knots in my stomach. I felt like I did the first time I fooled around with a man, back when I was still learning what covert meanings there were to certain words and a certain way a man might look at you.

Charles’ apartment was mostly shabby, but quite big and certainly nicer than what I’d grown up in. The living area was open and clearly used. Two small couches next to the radio, chairs scattered all over the place, a small table still littered with teacups and ashtrays, a drinks cabinet, and books stacked up against the wall in the spare places. The dining room wasn’t technically a separate room, but half-hid by gauzy blue and green curtains with an angular beaded design running down the sides. There was enough space to see at least eight chairs at the table. The walls seemed to be overhung with paintings, alternately full of raucous shapes and bulky human figures bustling against one another. And right in front of all that was a small, scuffed space of floor cleared of all furniture but a large Sonora record player. The doors on the cabinet beneath it were swung open to display the many record books, with even more stacked on the floor.

“So what do you think?” Charles asked, casting a sweeping arm upward.

An old fashioned chandelier from the ‘90s hung overhead like a centerpiece, dirty bronze and a permanent layer of schmutz obscuring the molding and twelve red and amber colored lighted glass cups.

Even I could tell if one were to put a little work into the place it could’ve been the height of class. It was purposefully louche, not terribly effectively hiding its affluent past.

A little like Charles.

“It’s swell.”

“I’ll go start some coffee. Have a seat and help yourself to a bottle. There’s some clean cups in the cabinet.”

From inside the kitchen, Charles’ voice still came through the walls, muffled and distracted. My heart wouldn’t stop racing. I wasn’t unfamiliar with illicit meetings with men, but I was forever unable to stop obsessing over small details that didn’t matter. My fondness for those men could fluctuate, but the scenes remained achingly clear every time. Almost clouding my head for the details. Of the rooms we met in, the words they said, the details of their physiognomy. And I could feel the image of Charles’ apartment being etched into my mind. Yet I still felt blurry, as if it weren’t happening at all.

I poured myself whatever was in the taller decanter for my nerves. I nearly gagged. It was pretty rotten. Hit me like a train.

“Are you hungry? I can make some sandwiches,” he said popping out of the kitchen to put on a record. He wildly turned the crank on the side of cabinet and set the needle down with a loud hiss. A moment later the air was filled with some up-tempo big band melody.

“Uh, no,” I said clearing my throat. “That’s alright.”

Charles laughed and pointed to the booze. “Apologies. That’s my sister’s experiment in bathtub gin. It’s awful stuff, God bless her.”

There was an awkward moment where Charles walked over and I stood up, hoping to go in for a kiss to get this started, but he didn’t notice and seated himself opposite me. I sat down uncomfortably.

“Are you alright, Erik?”

“I’m swell.”

“You know I’ve been wondering about you.”

Somehow I didn’t think he thought about me the same way I’d thought about him. Almost nightly, trying to recreate the exact arc of his lower lip in my mind. Living not for work or even indulging my own pleasures, but the fruitless hope of attaining this stranger one day. I was never anyone’s matching obsession, so I doubted his ponderation was anything other than passing.

“What about?”

Charles smiled knowingly, sympathetically. He was swiftly developing a huge repertoire of smiles. It made me uneasy.

“I’ve been concerned. A bit.”

That made me scoff. “Your concern might be a little misdirected, _old boy_.”

“I’ve no doubt you’re very capable when it comes to protecting Mr. Shaw’s interests. I was merely worried how someone—I’m going to be awfully forward. I was curious, I suppose, but more worried how someone in your lifestyle finds… company.”

“Company.”

“Romantic company. As it were.”

“Romantic company.”

Charles’ face scrunched up in embarrassment. “This isn’t coming out right. I don’t mean to be a Nosy Parker. I’m—I wanted to let you know there are places for people like us to find _company_.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or back out of the room. “I’ve been to baths before, Charles.”

Charles’ cheeks tinged pink a little. It was obvious he was trying to hold it back by succumbing to a self-reproving smile. “I thought it likely. I meant for us as homme nouveau, as mutants.”

It was so quiet I could hear the thumping of my own heart.

I didn’t even want to consider what Charles was talking about. Groups of people who were both mutant and queer. More than myself. But then, that’s why I was so excited for Charles. Why the idea, the potential of Charles had refused to leave Erik’s mind.

“Oh dear.” Charles’ face was suddenly bleak. “I’m afraid I’ve given you the wrong impression.”

Something in my chest tightened. I immediately tried to stay calm and unaffected, but it only my heart thump harder, spreading warmth into my face and limbs.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

I held up my hand for him to stop talking. The terrible part was that Charles looked and sounded genuinely apologetic.

“It’s fine.”

“No. I didn’t want you to think—Let me get the coffee and we’ll talk.”

As soon as the kitchen door swung behind him, I took a swig of his awful moonshine and got up to leave. It made sense that Charles wouldn’t be similarly interested. He was sweet and knew about what I did for a living. He had people; mutants like himself to rely on. Getting wrapped up with a card like me was nothing but dangerous and pointless.

Before I got to the door, however, there was a firm grip on my arm.

“Erik, I wish you wouldn’t go.”

I paused, unable to look away from his eyes. It was almost like a curse, how much I noticed them, bright and hopeful. Everything was broadcast from his eyes. I felt like one of those travelers of myth, being caught by the beauty of a siren, destined to be dashed on the rocks waiting for the siren’s love.

“I’ve made a fool of myself.”

Charles let out a delicate sigh, quite incommensurate with his artfully unkempt look. I had to restrain myself from imagining what kind of queers—queer mutants no less—were given the privilege of being his romantic company.

“No, it’s my fault. I think I led you on. I’m used to being—You’re different from most men I meet.”

“I’m dangerous, I know. It’s not like I know any other queers. I’m not the sort you keep around.”

Charles frowned. “No. No, that’s not it. I wouldn’t want to give the impression…” He sighed, but then with an almost sudden, surprising quickness braced a warm hand on my shoulder and reached up to kiss the side of my cheek.

I didn’t feel much more than a soft brush of his whiskers, but it burned pleasantly on my skin.

“I wish you would stay for conversation. I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted to talk to you. Your mind is very… Let’s just say, I see potential in having a friend. It isn’t often I feel that. So I know I’m not being selfless, but I want you to know, you shouldn’t have to be alone either. It’s terrible to think you’re alone. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t show you it can be different.”

I wasn’t sure if anyone else had said that I would have listened. But Charles had all the means to know who and what I was. Had done so and even surprised me with it. But he knew and wasn’t afraid of me. He knew me with a sight and wanted to know more.

And coming out of those eyes, how could I refuse?

It continued on like that for some weeks, into the better part of August, with Charles determinedly befriending me, alternately saying how important it was to have companions of a like and in diversity, and winning me over with his affable good manners and charming smiles. I didn’t think Charles fully understood the affect he had on people. He handled and glad-handed them all, perhaps not equally, but easily and with verve. It was never as though the amount of people, or what they might do or think, ever seemed to trouble him in the slightest.

He was incapable of seeing solitude as a virtue and put me on a course of meeting his peers and companions. Traditionally, I only knew people who I might one day be expected to kill. Being at Charles and Raven’s apartment was a new and worry-making development in that respect.

The first time I had returned to Charles apartment at his request, I had assumed that Charles and I would be alone. But I stepped into a cloud of laughter and chatter emanating from a group of five people at the dining table.

Before I could even doff my hat, a mutant girl jumped out of her seat and ran over to me, shaking my hand emphatically. She had yellow eyes and dark blue skin with raised alligator scales down her arms. Her sleek red-orange hair was cut into a Louise Brooks, pageboy bob. She seemed to be dressed like an occultist in a full length black frock, that sloped off her shoulders, covered in glittering yellow suns and stars, cinched around the waist with a long braided belt.

She was stunning and baffling all at once.

Her other scaled hand covered Erik’s in their handshake.

“You must be Erik! I’m so excited to finally meet you. Charles told me you can move metal around. That’s fantastic! We don’t have a telekinetic in our little group. Well, we did, but he moved some place boring.”

Charles gently tugged my coat from my shoulders and took my hat, passing me an indulgent smile. “Howard’s doing quite well in Cincinnati.”

She hadn’t introduced herself, but I knew enough from Charles brief mentions that it was obviously Raven.

Raven rolled her eyes. “Anyway, it’s just us corpses and Charles. Poor Charles is never going to find another telepath at this rate. I mean, there’s Emma, but putting them in the same room is like cats and dogs. Or watching two murderers who are far too dignified to stab each other trying to kill each other with insults instead. But your thing is sort of brainy isn’t it. Well, you’re not a corpse anyway.”

I paused. “Corpse?”

Raven turned to the table of others, whom I also presumed to be mutants considering Raven’s state of exposure and the other girl at the table with flittering, iridescent dragonfly wings, and a ripple of laughter coursed through them. A human looking young man with brown hair and glasses blushed.

Charles shook his head. “Hank and I were trying to delineate the types of mutations a few months ago. We decided to call mutations, like yours and mine, where the brain’s chemistry sways different wavelengths of energy _mutations of the anima_.”

Raven made a clawing gesture with her hands and made very, very convincing feline growl. “Animals.”

“And those physical mutations that affect the body mutations of the _corpus_ ,” Charles finished.

Raven slit her throat with her thumb. “Corpses.”

“It isn’t really that funny.”

“Who uses Latin anymore?” Raven said, like it was a great pain to even consider.

“A great many people including—“

Raven stuck out her tongue. “Killjoy. Anyway, we’re playing Ouija, contacting the spirits of other corpses. Wanna join?”

I didn’t really know what to say. The other mutants I worked with didn’t play games. Suddenly a gathering like this with Emma and Azazel and Janos playing Ouija or Backgammon in their bathrobes popped in my head. I nearly laughed. Part of me wanted to sit around them and see their mutations in action, but that seemed rather daunting. Especially if they were all like Raven.

I cleared my throat. “I think chess is more my speed.”

Raven looked at me like I’d personally let her down and cast her eyes to the ceiling. “Great. I might as well scram. You’re never gonna shake him now.”

She beat a path back to the table, while Charles looked slightly predatory.

He grinned. “She’s right, you know. I’m always hunting for another chess partner.”

I looked over to the table nervously, where conversation had already struck up again and Charles and I were forgotten to the appeal of their drinks and hokum. I hooked a thumb in their direction.

“Should we? I’m not sure how to talk to ghosts.”

Charles rolled his eyes much like Raven had. I couldn’t say there was much a family resemblance, but their attitudes seemed similar, if not pushed in different directions.

“I’d much rather challenge you to a game. I’ll admit it’s not what I had in mind this evening, but I’m unlikely to let go of it now, if that’s alright with you.”

“That sounds perfect.”

Over the next few weeks, however, I did get to know Charles and Raven’s friends. The ones at the table seemed to be regulars in the Xavier siblings’ apartment: Armando Munoz, a poet whose mutation was the ability to adapt to survive any harmful stimuli, earning him the nickname of Darwin; a bohemian songstress with wings who called herself Angel; Hank McCoy, a scientist of Charles’ acquaintance whose preternatural speed and strength he desperately tried to hide; and Sean, a young Irish trumpet player who often played with either Angel or Charles, and who could shatter panes of glass with his voice when he wasn’t playing. There were others, mostly human, who weren’t as regular as the others. There was a human woman named Moira who visited Charles, and never went off with Raven and her friends, with annoying regularity.

Charles was particularly invested in provoking all these young mutants into playing with their abilities, trying new things.

He informed Sean that with the proper wing-like attachment he could use the power of his voice to push against the ground and, in effect, fly. And he theorized that Darwin might me able to do things as extreme as grow another limb, should one be cut off from him.

And Charles became dogged about his insistence that the real key to exerting my ability was in executing its fine details.

“What’s the trick to throwing cars and steel beams about?” Charles said one late evening, or rather, one very early morning, with a flask in his hand.

I’d gone to see him after putting the fear of God into one of Beatty’s old lieutenants who wasn’t adjusting to Shaw’s regime, keeping a prostitute on the side as his mistress. Together they were kicking back about half of what they were earning. My orders had been to beat up the skirt and break the hood’s leg, but I couldn’t bring myself to beat up a woman. After I left the man’s face looking like a pound of hamburger, I only warned her against the dangers of cheating Shaw.

I’d gone to find Charles, knowing he could charm away my tension. There was some kind of party happening at Charles’ apartment, as usual, but this seemed to involve the whole floor of his apartment, as most of the hallways were filled with flappers and hipsters drinking and walking through people’s apartment doors. Without explaining a word, Charles herded me out to the small balcony attached to his bedroom, handed me a glass of brown, toasted me, “Tchin tchin.”

I frowned. “It took me some time to be able to move a steel girder.”

“But now you can. You can feel all the buildings going up. You’ve told me. And you can rip guns from people and bring down structures. But can you,” Charles paused to thrust his flask, a short wide stainless steel thing with geometric, rectangular etchings on the front, “Can you flatten out the incising on my flask and remake it? Without ruining the whole thing, mind.”

I took it from him tentatively, feeling the weight of the liquor inside slosh from side to side. The etchings were fine and appeared to come off as one line intersecting up and down to create the image of a series of towering buildings. The idea of recreating the design was dizzying for the design alone, not even taking into account making an indent in the metal that fine and intricate. My work was typically blunt work.

I held my hand out to feel the pull of the flask, but instead the larger things called to me. The steel bars holding up the balcony, the copper and lead pipes running through the buildings into a vast network below the streets, and the steel bones of the buildings themselves. The delicate thinness of the flask in my hand felt like it would melt against the weight of the other metals.

“I can’t do it,” I said, handing it back to Charles.

But he didn’t take it. “You didn’t even try.”

“There’s too much,” I motioned out to the City, knowing Charles would understand. “Interference.”

Charles didn’t look impressed. “There are a few hundred thousand people in this borough alone, yet I can still pick your head or Raven’s or Mrs. Lorello’s down the street out of all the others. Real skill comes in being a scalpel, not a claymore.”

I might have felt denigrated if it weren’t for the earnest, encouraging look to Charles’ face, like there was nothing he’d rather be doing than pushing me to using my ability.

I redoubled my concentration on the flask, this time ignoring the big steel and lead like one might ignore a room full of conversation in order to speak to one person. The flask was made of steel and aluminum and chromium pounded thin and stretched with heat and chemicals. I could feel its hollow inside and the fine lines engraved into it, the tiny lines of pressure where space was made. Yet the whole thing was so soft, too much effort and it would compress or blow apart. I could feel it all and wondered if I tugged, just slightly, as though I were simply pulling a thread, if the engraving would come clean.

I opened my eyes to the sound of Charles chuckling. He clapped a hand on my shoulder, sliding his palm there a few times before falling back.

“Good work, my friend.”

The front of the flask was smooth, not machine polished like it had been, but free of the lines etched into it. It was imperfect and warped slightly around where the engraving edges had been. Still, it wasn’t a crumpled ball and that was more than what I was expecting.

I couldn’t help myself from laughing, feeling unusually proud of myself for wielding something that had no heft to it.

Charles was smiling at me fondly, his hand coming up again to stroke my arm. He seemed to notice that and pulled it back. After a moment, he said, “Now all you have to do is put it back the way it was.”

We both laughed and made jokes about the resulting mess would resemble and drifted into other conversation.

Before I left, Charles tucked the flask into the inside pocket of my jacket. “I’m serious about finishing this project. I expect to find this again with some new inscription on it.”

I shook my head at him. “One of these days I’m going to set you to a task, or while you’re busy teaching all of us, your talents are going to go to waste. You need to exercise your ability just as much, Charles.”

For a very brief moment, a grim look flashed over his face. I almost doubted I had seen it, but it had been there, crestfallen and gloomy. But Charles’ usual smile returned swiftly like the doubt had never been there.

“Perhaps you’re right.”

But his voice and eyes were empty.

I wanted to ask him what was wrong. I wanted to bring back the familiar brightness in his eyes, but he was my friend and only my friend. There was an invisible bubble of distance between us I was constantly coming up against. It would have been too much to push. Anyway, there were other people still milling to and from his apartment.

Like Emma had said earlier that summer, Charles was one of those people who knew everyone and whom everybody knew. I supposed that was due to some amount of position. He didn’t talk about his family, but was easy to identify as coming from wealth. A few people could be overheard talking about the Xavier estate and wondering if they were _those Xaviers_. Charles knew all the little hidden things that rich people identified each other by and I had learned with confusion from Emma—what silverware was appropriate, what was done on vacations, what names were important. It was effortless to him, like his telepathy. But those were all things I knew from observation. If he, unlike the rest of Emma’s set and the upwardly mobile party-goers he frequented with, was not going to snidely inquire about my youth, I was going to afford him the same courtesy.

There were always people in Charles and Raven’s apartment, even on the nights they claimed they weren’t throwing a party. There was a seemingly endless rotation of faces that smoked in between alternating sips of hooch and tea, groped in the kitchen, and danced maniacally, scuffing up the ten foot of dance floor in the parlor.

“Don’t you have downstairs neighbors,” I scowled over a particularly ruthless move Charles made on the board one evening.

There were perhaps forty people milling through the increasingly tiny apartment. Charles and I were wedged in a corner opposite the drinks cabinet, so at least people weren’t elbowing us every time they refilled a glass.

Charles grinned serenely and pointed to a three flappers and a college-bound looking goof, surely belonging to one of them. “They’re over there.”

“Of course.”

It had been a few months now of knowing Charles, but having him as a routine in my life had only felt like days. Coming to his apartment after a shift at one of Shaw’s clubs, or on days I wasn’t needed to be the muscle in Shaw’s meetings— an increasingly frequent occurrence— had swiftly become normal. To the point where Charles and Raven’s group of regulars greeted me by name, inquired after my opinions on mutant awareness and the idea of asking for mutant representation in politics, and asked if I needed any reefer or dope.

Mutant awareness was a keen topic of discussion under the Xavier roof. In a way it reminded me of household discussions about Socialism with my mother and father and Aunt Judith. Darwin and Charles usually sided together, both advocating for caution in any theoretical situation where mutants would publicly play a role in society. I found allies amongst Raven and Angel, typically, when I proposed the idea of mutant sovereignty and self-governance. That was where Charles and I fundamentally disagreed. He saw cooperation and cohabitation with humans not only as beneficial, but essential.

“It isn’t even feasible, Erik. There are too few of us,” Charles would say.

“You don’t even know how many of us there are. You said yourself there could be hundreds of thousands of us. Everyone knows about us, more or less. We’re just an unspoken, barely tolerated truth, like queers. If we made ourselves known, we’d have strength in those numbers.”

Charles looked closed off, like there was something he wanted to say. He shook his head. “You’re assuming that all mutants would agree to the same thing. To leave their homes and families in order to start this separatist state you speak of. It’s not so simple.”

“It would be if they could see that the only true family a mutant has is with other mutants.”

Charles’ replies to that were never satisfying. He would never out right deny or confirm my idea. He’d look only vaguely concerned, but pat my arm or shoulder and change the subject.

We had conversations about the like, arguing over everything from Ezra Pound to the Pullman Porter strike, as summer shifted into fall. Though that changed little about the madhouse that was the apartment of the Xavier siblings.

I hated the din. I hated the constant chatter, particularly when it was directed at me. But there were colored people, mutants, women in hotsie totsie outfits, men wearing revue-style suits in garish colors, and bohemians. Of course, there were the humans there, who seemed to be meandering gatecrashers or more likely people looking for another free source of booze, as there seemed to be no gate to crash at the Xavier house. It was more like a temporary salon for those in need of alcohol. In short, seeing mutants being able to freely be themselves was a thing that actually tended to please me, despite the presence of humans. So the masses were something I could adjust to with as much grace as I could muster.

And it lessened the hardship, when a great deal of this time was spent talking with Charles about mutants, politics, art, and anything else we fancied.

However having humans who had always been exposed to the rumors of mutants, and humans who even knew some personally, was different than being around big crowds of humans.

Raven sauntered over through the partygoers and crashed into Charles’ laugh with a huff.

“Like little boring old men that sit in the park. I swear, Lehnsherr you’ve entirely domesticated our Charles. It’s sad, really,” Raven said, strategically sticking feathers into her headband.

She was in her preferred human guise—a pinked-skinned blonde figure, athletic, but a little more voluptuous than was strictly vogue. But she looked like any rich human girl you might find at a party or on a tennis court.

“You know, if I had my say, you’d be yourself at all times,” I said in lieu of greeting.

Her face fell a little, but she shrugged. “There are too many humans.”

Charles patted her hip. “I promise we’ll have one of our mutants-only soirees soon.” Casting a pointed look at me, he added, “And it’s not as though you’re not being yourself. You simply look different.”

“Yes, but she shouldn’t have to look different for anyone’s benefit.”

“I would rather think that this is for Raven’s benefit. People might react badly.”

“So you admit that humans can’t be trusted in the face of—“

“I didn’t say that. And honestly, I wish you would stop defining us as different groups so much. It’s more—“

Raven let out a loud, aggravated sigh and collapsed dramatically against Charles, leaning her head on his neck and shoulder. Charles laughed.

“Alright, alright, we’ll stop.”

Raven tugged at the collar of Charles’ sweater, but looked at me. “Anyone would mistake you for old married couple, honestly. Well, maybe if we could get one of you in a dress. Charles, what color do you think Erik would look good in? Maybe green. He has got that nice auburn hair.”

“Raven,” Charles said with a mildly disgruntled sigh. “Can I help you with anything?”

She smiled at me wolfishly. “Everything’s Jake. And you two newlyweds can do what you like. A bunch of us are headed downtown. I don’t suppose you want to go out and see some actual nightlife.”

For a moment I thought Charles was going to ask me along. Part of why I continually came to Charles’ was so I didn’t have to go to Shaw’s clubs, or be seen by Shaw’s competitors. So I could have a life that resembled something other than my own. But Charles shook his head.

“I think we’re fine where we are. Aren’t we, Erik?”

I had to quell an impulse to say no. Things weren’t fine—the world over or, really, between Charles and I. I wanted to say that nothing was really fine when we had to hide all the damn time. But I couldn’t say that. All I could do was nod, take a drink, and keep my thoughts to myself.

Though not all of our gatherings were so perfectly sedate and serene.

The one occasion I did try cocaine—which everyone found odd that I hadn’t considering an aspect of my job entailed procuring dealers and money from dealers—was late August on a humid, disquieting night of boredom in the City. Shaw had made himself scarce for a few days after taking a cop names Smith upstate. I hadn’t been told the details, but considering Shaw did it himself, it was probably a big deal. Emma had been left managing The Caspartina. She brought in her own help and basically told me to go blow. It had left me feeling anxious and wired for a few days.

The experiment with the cocaine didn’t end well. I never remembered much of it, but I did remember being very adamant that Raven and Angel’s idea of going to a burlesque house was brilliant. I remembered feeling like I was going very fast. I remembered being on a rooftop at some point with Sean, watching his shouts send flocks of pigeons flying in the distance.

And I remembered coming back to Charles’ apartment to see Charles a shock of bare skin bent over in front of Armando. There was so much skin, and wet, heavy breaths. I can’t recall how long it took to register they were fucking, but it couldn’t have been more than a second. One simple image branded in my mind. Charles’ head snapped up and the whites of his eyes burned in the darkness.

It felt like a sudden drop into a frozen lake, unsure of how I walked or if I could walk. I spent the better part of my taxi ride home feeling like I was going to have a heart attack, until I ground the brakes to the wheel with my ability, struggled out against the driver’s voice and walked home. I felt like I was being chased by the ghosted image whenever I closed my eyes. I woke up the next morning feeling sick and weak, and rather having the memory erased from me, with the image of Darwin fucking Charles seared into my brain.

Of course, Charles sought me out.

He knocked quietly in the late morning, nearly noon. The heat in my apartment was already sweltering, and I hadn’t even opened the curtains. I let Charles in, wordlessly, not even bothering to take his coat, and he sat down on the sofa where my grandmother used to sit. The sitting room was so bare and unused since she died. The davenport was nearly dusty.

He opened his mouth to speak, made a small sound, but didn’t actually commit to any words, ensconcing us in the pursuing silence. I could dimly hear the removed din of people and motorcars beyond the windows, but Charles and I were miles away from anyone or anything. It felt like the walls of my apartment were closing in. I had to feel for the pipes in the walls to remind myself where the boundaries of my room where. I had to remind myself that Charles was really there, and what I’d seen was not some hallucination.

Finally, Charles seemed to get enough air in his chest to speak.

“I’m sorry. I mean, I should apologize be—“

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, holding back a disgusting taste in my throat.

“No, I never meant for you to see that. I certainly never wanted to run you off. I—“

“It was the dope. You can fuck who you like.”

Charles cringed. “I just thought you should know that, well, I was embarrassed. I didn’t plan for you to see that. It’s just casual between Armando and I, anyway.”

“Of course it’s meaningless. When has fucking ever been anything but?”

Even to my own ears, my voice was raw and emotional. There was a torrent of things in my chest, words I wanted to say, but couldn’t do it. Part of it was that I didn’t want to beg for something Charles wouldn’t give me. Another part of me was unsure it was even Charles that inspired it. Perhaps Charles was just the first person with whom I saw even the potential for bonding, to share a bit of what my parents had. So from my very first thoughts I wanted it to happen, assumed it would.

That certainly didn’t mean Charles wanted the same thing. Obviously he didn’t. He was content to fuck Darwin, even though they were friends. There was nothing for me to be jealous of because there was nothing for me to have.

I was so desperate to keep him out of my head at that moment, virtually screaming it as though Frost were trying to dig into me. I could see Charles squirm from it. It was the first time I realized that perhaps Charles might not know exactly what I, or even he wanted.

“I just wanted to apologize,” Charles said, quietly, looking down as nervous and uncomfortably as I’d ever seen him look. He was even biting the inside of his cheek.

I nodded but didn’t speak, not trusting my voice to sound resolute or impervious to his affections, or lack of affections.

He cleared his throat after another wretched silence. “I also wanted to tell you… I should’ve told you days ago. I have to leave for England.”

My first thought was that he meant permanently. In an instant I imagined those past three months being wiped clean from me. Everything I’d known about Charles and come to love wouldn’t matter. He would be nothing but a brief interlude, a dismissed infatuation. The thought sunk into me like a dead weight. I was already beginning to ache from his absence. I was already beginning to think of how I could compensate for the loss, of how I could convince him to stay.

Yet, part of me at least, wanted him to leave. Part of me wanted him pulled out of my life, leaving a brief, inexplicable phenomena in his place. A little notched gap in my skin, like a poorly healed over bullet wound. As long as he was still there, that wound would always be pulled open and flow over and over again, a painful reminder that I was still alive.

Charles continued on, unaware of the spasmodic beating of my heart. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I hope it’s only a few weeks, but I don’t…”

I looked up at Charles. Somehow it had escaped me so far. He looked tired and young, with red-rimmed eyes and a sleep-worn dishevelment to his beard and hair and undone collar. There was no manner of expressive grin hiding behind his lips. There was worry in his eyes. And it struck me for the first time that, for all I’d thought I knew of him, I had no real conception of this creature.

In spite of that, I still wanted him. No, it made me want him more to know he was not an inanimate, coy acme of my imagining, but a complex being still outside my reckoning.

“Is something wrong?” I said tentatively.

He pressed his lips together in a wan smile and shook his head. The sad, agitated look in his eyes did not leave. “I’ve got to help my mother… She’s got herself into a difficult situation with a man looking for her money… Always a trouble for widows, of her sort.”

Against a strong desire not to, I said, “Do you need help?”

For some reason, that only made Charles look worse. He covered his face with his hand, but before he could I saw tears start to trail from his eyes. Of course, he cried beautifully. Even with the facial hair, just on the border of unkempt, he was a beautiful man. That alone stung. He shook his head vehemently and spoke with a wet nasal wheeze.

“Oh no, I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly accept your help. I don’t deserve…” He paused for a second and in a hurried whisper muttered, “I’m so sorry” like he never intended for it to be heard.

His name spilled from my lips without any thought. I wanted so badly to do something. No one else forced such compassion or want from me. But as his shoulders came down, burdened with the weight of something he would not show me, I wanted to take him against me and sweep away his trouble with my hands.

I wanted to, but I held back, letting my hand hover above his shoulder for a moment before grabbing my own knee to keep from reaching out again.

“I fear I should not have come,” Charles muttered, but then quickly wiped his face with the back of his hand and shook his head. “It’s nothing. It’s nothing I haven’t had to do for my mother before. I only wanted to—I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. May I write to you while I’m away?”

I nodded cautiously.

Before this neither Xavier sibling had mentioned much about their family. I knew Raven was adopted, some kind of childhood friend of Charles’. I knew that any passing mention of Charles’ mother was in reference to her traveling abroad more or less permanently, and that she was prone to drink. The topic of Charles’ mother prior to this had made him neither unduly nostalgic nor sorrowful. Just terse and silent. So I suspected Charles’ burst of emotion over this had another hidden meaning behind it. Perhaps tied to the other pockets of information about Charles Xavier I did not possess.

“Good,” Charles said, forcibly pulling up a mask of brightness. “It’s possible I’ll be traveling. It will be difficult to get a hold of me if you want to respond, so I’ll give you the address to my family estate. They’ll forward the letters to me. It will save you on postage, too.”

I suddenly wondered how much of his famed affability was genuine. It pierced my own chest to be suspicious of Charles, but there was so much to be answered for. The longer I knew him, the further away answers had become.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

I couldn’t keep it in any longer, but it wasn’t as though that was a shock to either of us. Charles didn’t look offended or startled, but more of the same—anxious and melancholy. He had probably even known that I knew there was something missing, something jarring. Nor did I expect him to break down in confession what he was keeping from me. I only knew I had to say it.

Charles looked away and stood up. “I should go.”

I made no effort to stop him. But he paused before he reached the door. Charles spoke hesitantly.

“You mean a great deal to me, Erik. I’ve never been as close to anyone as I’ve been to you. There is very much I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. There are… It’s difficult.”

An unexpected, or perhaps not unexpected, but only dormant, torrent of anger burned low in my throat. “You’re speaking to a murderer, Charles. You know everything about me. Damn your difficulties.”

Charles turned in slightly, eyes bright and full of unshed tears, and cleared his throat. “Please, stop in on Raven occasionally, or she’ll try to come find you.”

I couldn’t tell if Charles left before I could respond, or he left because I didn’t respond. Time and sound became one static thing, seeming to drift beyond me. And I don’t remember moving until Azazel came to fetch me for work.

 

 

 

 

 _“My candle burns at both ends;_  
It will not last the night;  
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends  
It gives a lovely light!”

_A Selection of Letters_

 

September 23rd, 1928

Dear E—,

I hate the way we parted. It has been nearly a month since I left. I’ve already been gone longer than I hoped. I think I have started a dozen letters to you in that time and thrown them all in the bin. Part of me wanted to let it go and pretend I haven’t been so horrible, but I woke up this morning with a fire inside me. I felt like I had opened my eyes for the first time. Setting things right with you seemed the only important thing in the world.

The bother is I don’t know how to mend myself, or how to fix what we have.

Raven often tells me how I’m the dimmest smart person she knows. I laugh it off, but I suspect she’s right on the money. I suffer from a peculiar kind of myopia. Rather than the standard old saying, I regularly fail to see the trees for the forest. While becoming absolutely convinced I needed you in my life, I failed to tell you that. I failed to tell you your opinions and your friendship have meant the world to me.

With that particular way I see the world, it is sometimes difficult for me to be resolute and keep myself apart from a body’s privacy the way I should. I learned from a young age to respect that but I often fail. In the back and forth of firming that resolve, I am prone to forgetting I know things other people don’t.

In regards to my relationship with you, I forget that you don’t know how special you are. I should have told you how much you mean to me, of my fondness for you. Yet even that means nothing if I don’t confess certain things to you.

Before I left, you said I was not being honest with you about everything. That is, of course, entirely correct. There are certain secrets I hold that aren’t properly mine to tell. Moreover, it has always been difficult for me to be open with people. I think honesty comes naturally to you. I think that is why it hurts you so to hide certain things about yourself. That is what makes you beautiful, such a spectacular, startling example of humanity. That is what makes your mind so engrossing and engaging.

If this is my offering of peace, my attempt to apologize to you, imperfect though it is as I cannot see you or leave this place to be with you, I want to tell you a story. There are other stories I would rather tell you, but would only hazard to do so in person.

When I was a boy, I was both spoiled and ignored, as it sometimes goes with the children of wealthy parents. Most of my supervision was provided by my nanny, or what staff was unfortunate enough to have attracted my attention that day. Sometimes I clamored so for attention I would throw things or have a screaming tantrum, and my nanny would shut me away in my room for most of the day. On my sixth birthday, my mother organized a party. My father’s colleagues, people of note, and their children were there. I was to be a good child and perform my little floundering version of ‘The Glow-Worm’ on the piano for my mother’s guests. But I happened to be dead set against it. I had been wanting give my mother a recital for weeks leading up to the party, but she hadn’t the time.

When my mother trotted me out in font of her company, and I stamped my little foot in refusal, she politely took me out of the room for a scolding. It was the only time my mother ever struck me. Normally that was a task left for my father. She slapped me hard across the face and said: “You must never forget that you have to earn people’s attention. You will always have to sing for your supper in one way for another.”

I have never forgotten that lesson.

I don’t think this is an excuse for treating you badly, but it might help explain. There is so much I want to share with you, but I fear losing you dearly. Given the choice to have you as a friend or to bungle things up with intimacy, I chose the best way I knew to keep you, if at a distance.

I wish I could say this to your face, but I’m not strong like that. It is easier, sometimes, to admit things on paper.

I hope you can forgive me. And I hope you know that I will always be a friend to you, whenever you need me, even if you can’t find it in yourself to look at me.

Love,  
CX

 

_October 5th, 1928_

My Dear C—,

Reading your letter gave me heart. I did visit Raven like you asked. We were both worried about you, because as of the writing of this letter she had received only one missive and only one phone conversation from you. Five weeks is a long time to be overseas without knowledge of your well being.

I cannot pretend that knowing your affection is returned makes me feel anything other than alive. But neither can I pretend that I loathe this use of initials and coded speech. Of course it isn’t you that angers me, but the world that establishes this mode of behavior. You know of it. You’ve condemned it with me. For so long I thought that I had only the passion of hate inside me, but you have shown me I can also have the passion of love.

How do I exist with both in this world? How can I keep this love and hate at the same time without burning up from the both of them?

Sometimes I wish there were only you and me in the world.

As for your concern over bungling things up with intimacy, it always struck me as the wiser notion, though it taunts me. Abandoning you for any reason is not something I can fathom. So in all reality, intimacy doesn’t matter, I suppose. I would love you with or without it. And this is isn’t a world that is kind to the intimacy of the sort you and I have in us.

I’d have you as you are, no matter what. I would only ask of you to tell me the truth. If we can only share intimacy between our minds that is what I’ll have without regret. We’ll love each other like the ancients did in your stories, purely and without the degradation of touch.

Only do it. If you wish to be honest with me, be honest with me. There’s nothing you can give me freely I will reject.

Yours,  
E—

 

_November 20th, 1928_

My Darling E—,

I received your last letter later than I should have, I expect. I’m glad to hear that Raven is staying out of trouble.

I think a sort of newsletter is a fantastic idea. Of course we will fight about distribution, but I would love to contribute what little work I did on genetic research to the effort. I can deliver you a list of contacts who will be helpful enough to send their studies as well. In the mean time, Hank will be of service in that regard. I think that’s a marvelous idea to help reach people and give them idea of the science behind this new stage of human evolution.

I have only ever put a little thought into it, but there was always an inkling in my mind to start a school for people like us to receive special training. We have all shared stories of our youths before, and I think you would agree that the idea of a school for young, gifted people is categorically useful.

I can’t write for long today. I must be going in just a few minutes. I simply needed to get this letter in the post before the week’s end because I think an awareness newsletter is fabulous. I’m certain you will do it more than admirably and I’m willing to help in anyway necessary, both financially and with content.

With love,  
CX

 

_December 9th, 1928_

My Dearest C—,

Your absence is becoming interminable. You’ve been gone for over two months now. How much money has your mother lost? You’ve said almost nothing of what’s happening there. Are you still in England? Are you with family? Do you need help? Raven is starting to worry. Rather she’s starting to worry in a way that now she admits she is worried. I think your vast crew of friends have even begun to notice you’re gone.

Your friend Moira found me the other day. She cornered me outside the club, desperate to get inside your apartment for some cigarette case she left there. I was going to make her wait, but she made such a big to-do about it that I relented. It’s a good thing I did. Later there was some trouble. I can’t go into the details here, but they covered it in a few of the papers. It’s getting to look like the hammer is coming down. I might be doing my work for the “awareness newsletter” from a cell if I’m not careful.

Please write soon if you need help. Better still, give me a ring. I long to hear your voice. I’m at the apartment most days, if only to make sure Raven doesn’t let the place get ransacked when she dashes out to some nightclub at the last minute. But you know I can’t be there all the time. So for Raven’s sake, you should return as soon as you can. There are others here who would appreciate your attentions more.

It would be nice to play another game of chess with you before the year is out.

Yours faithfully,  
E—

 

 

 

_“Never saw the sun shining so bright. Never saw things going so right. Noticing the days hurrying by, when you’re in love, my how they fly.”_

_The New Year,1929_

 

Charles returned on December 27th, 1928. He looked rather tired and pale, enveloped in gray woolen coat that was too large for him. His beard was fuller than ever, untrimmed and coppery. He was a fur hat away from looking the full Marxist. But he had his portable chess set tucked under his arm, still cold snowflakes dusted across his hair and shoulders, and a bright blue-sky shine to his eyes.

“It’s a few days before the new year. I hope that means we have time for a game.”

That was one of the happiest moments of my life, forever stitched in the fabric of my mind. Warmth flooded my body. I embraced him like one might a long lost friend. In my more panicked minutes of his absence, I was beginning to suspect he would never come back, that he’d simply run away from me and found some lover in Europe who gave him what I couldn’t. It was startling to think that I had only met Charles a half a year before, for all the space he’d taken up in my life. It was just as startling then to imagine my life before and without him.

Despite the nagging feeling of wanting to have a true romance with him, and the hurt that had entered my heart before he left, I was overjoyed to see him.

It was nearly midnight when Charles arrived. He said he’d “kept an ear out” for me as he took a taxi over, to see if I was working at The Caspartina, or over at Shaw’s office. Once again, I wondered how he knew where Shaw’s office was, but it could have been as simple as getting a paycheck for one of his gigs, or reading the man’s mind. We played a long, leisurely game well into the night. I caught him up on what was going on with my proposed idea for a newspaper for mutants, an idea taken straight from the Yiddish papers of my youth. I told him of the times I spent with Raven and Angel, of talking to Sean and Hank about their abilities, of how I convinced Alex to come to our get-togethers to know other mutants who weren’t only criminals.

When I asked what had happened with Charles’ mother, he waved it off. “He took the money I gave him and she went off to Paris again. I’d rather not talk about it.”

I couldn’t fathom how or why that had taken months to work out, but I didn’t press. Not prying was a cornerstone of our relationship, and there had been a bit of anger to Charles’ voice when he said it, offended at the very words coming out of his mouth. Part of the reason was selfish as well. I did want him to be more honest, like he’d said in his letters, but I was far too pleased he was back to risk the chance that he’d leave.

We fell asleep for a few hours on the couch, with our shoulders resting together. Charles woke me up, closer to noon than morning, demanding to make us breakfast.

After a shower and a shave, for me, Charles scooped some slightly rubbery eggs onto my plate. They weren’t terrible or terribly good, but I was still delighted. The last time anyone had cooked for me was before my Bubbe died.

“I think I’ve finally mastered these,” he said happily, almost to himself, when he turned off the cooker.

Charles and Raven could barely take care of themselves in some ways. Neither of them could launder or iron, so all their clothes were sent out for cleaning. They had a woman come in to clean. But Charles had a particular fondness for trying to cook. He was perpetually surprised by his own ability to not burn simple dishes.

“One day you’ll be a grown up,” I said cheekily.

He wrinkled his nose in distaste and gave me some toast and cup of coffee.

Out of nowhere Charles cleared his throat and said, “Anyway, I wanted to take you to the Webster for New Year’s Eve. Have you been to Webster Hall?”

I paused. Many people knew about Webster Hall, and I was sure I knew what Charles was hinting at. He’d heard of the drag balls, even seen the flyers at certain establishments for their revels, the massive parties where all the City’s faggots and fairies pranced around nude and took opium and fucked in the hallways. Obviously, everything I’d heard was gossip. I didn’t believe for a minute there was a cornucopia of Roman-style debauchery happening every weekend on 11th Street. But the types of queers that might be there had always made me nervous. Married old men, venerable City aristocrats, who looked like walruses fondling effete, pretty little boys in order to escape their wives for a few hours.

Charles had a style that was definitely romantic, and in clothing alternating between collegiate sweaters and more commonplace ware, but his mannerisms were only slightly fey. I had chalked that up to his upbringing in England. He wasn’t a very obvious queer.

“I hadn’t thought you’d go to things like that.”

A cheeky grin passed over Charles’ face as he looked up from his cup of orange juice. The blue of his glass glinted like his eyes. “When have you known me to turn down a party?”

“No, not that. The… the dressing up like women nonsense.”

Charles snorted. “You don’t have to go in drag. It isn’t a big thing anyway. Charlie Chaplin does it and makes a thousand dollars a picture. I don’t see why we can’t.”

“Wait—Chaplin is a queer?”

Charles laughed. It was such pleasant sound I forgot for a moment we were about to disagree about something. “No. Well, not that I—How could I possibly know? I just meant it’s just a bit of fun. It’s a masquerade.”

“It’s not to behave like women? It’s not just Ethels?”

“While it doesn’t surprise me at all that you’ve never been to a drag ball, I can’t believe you don’t even—Never mind. Wearing a frock isn’t mandatory. It’s the New Year’s Eve ball. Yes, it is supposed to be fanciful, but you can wear whatever you’d like.” He added over his glass, quietly, as though he was hoping I wouldn’t hear him properly, “But I think the opportunity to meet other sympathetic people will be nice for you. I just don’t want to imagine you skulking about some dreadful bath that’s knee-deep in diseases when there’s so much more out there.”

“I don’t skulk anywhere,” I said, recoiling from the coffee. He and Raven both made their coffee particularly strong. Sometimes I wondered how they didn’t kill themselves.

He continued, “This is a new age in the world. Modernization and education will bring so much understanding. Soon, queers won’t have to hide in seedy city corners. Neither will mutants. We’ll all be able to approach each other as equals.”

I snorted. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Charles frowned indulgently in that way that clearly implied he thought he was right and I was being ridiculous. I was somewhat relieved to know that despite Charles’ months of being gone, some things didn’t change.

“Will you think about it, though?”

Charles’ parties and friends were one thing, where I could largely ignore people if he wanted, because Charles kept people from knowing exactly what I did for a living. But what Charles wanted was for me to find a trick. Well, not a trick, but a boy to keep around. A man to meet with on certain evenings away from the places we both lived.

A man to distract me from him, so we could have these long nights of chess and conversation together in relative peace.

“We’ll just have to get you some nice glad rags,” Charles said, barreling through my silence.

“I have a nice suit.”

Charles made of his scrunched up, rabbitty faces.

“I have a suit.”

“I’m sure it’s perfectly serviceable for most things. But this is a little ritzy.”

“I thought I could wear whatever I want.”

“You can. There are all kinds of costume you can wear. As long as it’s high hat.”

“Charles.”

“It’s a ball! It’s New Year’s Eve! I promise it will be the absolute limit. You’ll have a fantastic time. I shall take you to get fitted for a tux, even. And you can wear a mask. No one will have ever seen you unless you want it.”

I shook my head, knowing this would only end badly, but unable to turn Charles down. And Charles could tell. He was positively beaming.

“You won’t regret it.”

“I’m certain I will.”

After a moment of silence, I couldn’t suppress my curiosity any longer.

“Will you be wearing one of Raven’s frocks, then?”

Charles laughed. “No, I was going to spiff up, obviously, but I didn’t plan on going the full drag. Besides, I don’t think Raven’s quite forgiven me from the last time I wore one her gowns.”

I gaped at him. It was hard to visualize. I kept imagining him in one of Raven’s glittering spinners and couldn’t get past the beard.

“Charles!”

“What? We’re about the same size.”

“That’s not what I have a hard time believing.”

“I assure you I looked ravishing. Though, it was black and might have made me look a little too pale.”

“Of course, you’re so fair,” I spat, which only caused Charles to laugh.

“So you’ll come?”

I took up my cigarette from the ashtray and mocked his jaunty tone from earlier. “When have I ever been able to resist a party?”

In the days before the ball, I was inexplicably nervous. It made me feel like a fretting girl from a storybook, which was not a way I had ever longed to feel. I thought about reneging several times, but I dutifully went to Charles’ tailor and got fitted anyway. I obviously didn’t tell Shaw my plans, but I did tell Emma that I would be out of town.

Emma eyed me suspiciously when I stopped by the office of The Caspartina. I could feel her psychic clutches encircling me. I took a cue from one of Charles’ suggestions and thought of something irrelevant and strange to put her off. I focused on the image of Raven and Angel doing the Charleston in front of the record player, Raven swinging around so wildly the heel of her shoe kicked the front door off its hinges.

Emma frowned with a mixture of disinterest and curiosity. “I wouldn’t have thought she was your style. Is this who you’re leaving us for?”

“I’m not leaving anywhere. I’m taking a personal absence. I’ve earned it.”

After a moment, she nodded. “You can keep your secrets. And Xavier can keep his.”

I tried to not let the words bother me, but they settled poorly in my stomach. I only reminded myself that Charles was allowed his secrets. He wasn’t perfect, like I would often falsely remember him to be. But Charles had only just returned.

I was determined to keep Emma’s cryptic words from spoiling things for me.

Early in the day on New Year’s Eve, I’d stopped at the little nameless tailor where I’d gotten fitted for a tux. However when I attempted to pay for my suit, the owner told me the bill had already been paid. Of course it was Charles, but the only note on the inside said _Enjoy yourself_ attached with a pin to the black mask I was to wear with my tux. The mask was very basic, covering the eyes and nose, but for light sweep of dark, iridescent green on the left side of the mask that matched the color of my cummerbund and bowtie. The pointed edges at the temples and nose made it look rather sharp and forbidding. To add to the masquerade look, there was also a very dark, old-fashioned opera cape with the suit. The outer part was black, but inside shimmered dark green and blue when it moved, like iridescent beetle wings.

I stood outside the Hall for a moment, watching other people come in through a back alley, with a light snow spotting the black sky, and almost turned around. Charles had told me he would meet me at Webster Hall—because he had to go uptown to pick up Raven and Angel and he was so sorry, darling, he really was, but he’d be there precisely at ten, he promised— and so I agreed to wait there for him.

The ballroom felt massive, definitely larger than it was in reality.

There was a huge dance floor in front of a stage large enough for an orchestra. There was a full band in, including some who were joining in the revelry—cellists and trombone players who were clearly men dressed in the same flowing, frivolous style as flappers. There was a line of a dozen men as sequined chorus girls, draped in feather boas, moving around the room. The waiters and waitresses were all in drag, carrying large round trays above their heads covered in champagne glasses. There were sheiks and shebas and geishas with broad shoulders and Egyptian kings and French aristocrats and people made to look like birds and cats. It was patently and markedly weird, but also a relief. It felt welcoming.

There were men dancing with each other—not only a man in a tuxedo with what looked like a woman, but pairs in drag, and pairs in regular clothes, twirling around each other and holding hands. There were women slumped over each other, putting their lips together and breathing each other’s cigarettes. There were queers holding each and kissing in the middle of the dance floor. No one batted an eye. No one was hiding in the corners, or looking over their shoulders. No one looked nervous or hesitant.

It felt, a little, like my chest had been opened up with a crowbar. My heart was pounding loud enough for me to hear.

I had no idea what Charles would be wearing. There were perhaps upward of two hundred people there. Almost all of whom were dressed in drag or garish costume, full tilt, as though it were the last New Year’s Day the world would ever see.

Thankfully, though, I only had to wait about fifteen minutes past ten, while too many people laid their hands down my arms as they passed to and from the bar, before Charles’ politely inquiring mind pressed against mine.

_I hope we’re not too late_

I thought back at him, _Just late enough_

There was a feeling of happiness and excitement, and then Charles asking for and retrieving my location at the bar.

I saw Raven first. She was in her natural form, blue scales and red orange hair, and wearing a loose leopard spotted frock that was draped over her, with a miniature toy dagger strapped to her arm. Her friend Angel was wearing a white Grecian gown, with her real wings visible and fluttering opalescent behind her shoulder. Raven waved to me, took Angel’s hand and scampered off to a group of people standing around a pyramid of martini glasses.

That left Charles.

He was wearing something simple, as promised. A regular tuxedo, much like the one I was wearing, except his jacket and waistcoat were gray, rather than black, with soft gray spats. In his breast pocket was a blue silk handkerchief. He was wearing blue and gray wings, but, unlike Angel’s, his were fake and unmoving. And his feathery mask had a distinctly owlish look to it, with peaked, ruffled ears and a beak covering his nose. Even at a distance, I could see his eyes through the holes in the mask, bringing up the colors of his outfit.

The frame and look and overall feel were undoubtedly him, but I was struck agog because the reliable trim of almost gingery scruff was gone from his face. Even with the mask obscuring the top half of his face, I could see the delicate slope of his jaw line more clearly. Why he was always bearded made a great deal of sense now. He could easily be mistaken for a boy of seventeen or eighteen.

“You look…” I stopped my mouth so I didn’t say anything stupid, but it didn’t quite work. “… like an owl.”

Charles grinned and leaned next to me on the bar. “That was the theme, being a wise old owl.”

“That’s a little premature. On both counts.”

That made Charles throw his head back in laughter.

“Did you meet anyone interesting while you were waiting?”

I had forgotten that was his goal from this. Of course, I hadn’t told Charles that I had no interest in talking to any other men. It was dangerous for me. It was dangerous for them. Amongst the myriad ways I was peculiar to the world at large, I also didn’t really enjoy the company of other people very much. The exceptions were few and far between. Charles, being not only one of those exceptions but a mind reader besides, should’ve known that.

I shrugged, feeling the weight of the cape with the slight movement. Charles reached up and adjusted the clasp that rested at the top of my chest. “Not so much.”

Charles shook his head, but didn’t sound too upset. “You haven’t even spoken to anyone, have you?”

“What does one do at these things, anyway?” I said, hoping Charles would go along with me in ignoring the whole issue.

“Well, primarily, we drink.”

With a brassy quirk of his lips, Charles put his fingers to his temple, silently and rather dramatically indicating he was about to use his power. In moments a bartender dressed in a large black and white Gibson dress and a huge feathery hat like a turn of the century grand dame delivered us two slight glasses filled with green liquid.

Sensing my doubt, Charles said, “Absinthe.”

I knew what it was. I even knew that wasn’t like the tooth-rotting stuff our grandfathers would have drunk, or the embalming fluid most bootleggers concocted. I was simply unsure of what would happen. But when Charles picked up his glass, winked, and said, “Cheers, darling,” I followed suit, not to be outmanned. I drank it down like Charles, and felt it hit the bottom of my stomach with a palpable thud. It had a strong burn, stronger than bad whiskey, but probably not as bad as Raven’s bathtub gin. I quickly felt light on my feet, unsteady, and slightly giddy.

Charles took me around the room, introducing me to people who seemed to either leer at or ignore me. There were other mutants there, half-exposed in the party atmosphere. There were regular people in the know, but most of them probably would have been fooled into thinking specimens of beauty like Angel or Raven were just wearing particularly good costumes. I tried to engage in conversation, really, but Charles’ vast network of acquaintances were boring. I mostly wound up engaged in intimate tête-à-têtes with Charles.

Whenever I asked someone, “Well, don’t you think queers should be able to announce themselves into a room and have their own spouses, just like everyone else?” they only seemed to look green and back away.

It seemed this Hall that was bold enough to house men dancing with men while dressed in drag, which would hold up traffic anywhere else, was not bold enough to house my inquiries.

Then Charles would answer with something like, “Of course I do, but it’s not as though you can just force that kind of change on people. It needs to be done in increments, for everyone’s safety.”

“You don’t think humans should be subject to the same rules we are,” I would respond.

“Now that’s not it at all. I just don’t think it’s wise to expose ourselves, as it were, to people who don’t know anything about the differences that make us the way were are, especially when they might be violent about it.”

“Their behavior is their responsibility, not ours.”

“Yes, but the repercussions for their behavior will always be ours.”

“So mutants should just wait quietly for humans to accept us. And homosexuals should live as we do. At best with the one we want to be with, but secretly and in suspicion of everyone else, or alone, or, at worst, in a complete lie while pretending to be normal.”

Charles would frown and avoid me by saying something, “Well, I’m not a full homosexual anyway. I’m only a homosexual half the time. I don’t have the proper insight into how things should be done.”

And I would say, “You never make any sense, Charles,” with an inkling of suspicion that was how he wanted to leave every argument—half-finished and undone.

We wondered the ballroom like that, drifting from group to group after we had scared away each last one. We eventually made such a circle around the room that we collided with Raven and her group. I recognized Angel, of course, on her arm, weaving her fingertips over the bared scales on Raven’s shoulder. There were a few others whose faces made a light impression in my memory. And Armando. He was dressed as an ancient Roman in a toga, with a golden laurel on his head. Ovid, he said, and was about to do some sort of recitation much to the delight in Charles’ enraptured eyes, before I dragged Charles away.

“What? What’s wrong?”

My heart was pounding. My fingers curled tightly around Charles’ arm as I pulled him closer to me. Perhaps it was the booze and the absinthe, perhaps it was the heated swarm of people and the din, but I felt dizzy and Charles was the perfect size. His shoulders fit right under my arm and his face would settle into the side of my neck, I knew it would if he would only let me touch him.

I pulled him to me, petting my hands over his shoulders.

“I want… I want to dance.”

“What?”

“I want to dance with you.”

I pointed out the dressed and cross-dressed gaggle on the dance floor, avoiding the people drinking in the corners of the room and the divans of lounging dope smokers. There were plenty of them and it didn’t look too ridiculous.

Charles laughed. “Alright.”

The first two songs were pleasant enough. I got to move around and clear my head a little. The music was cheerful and brassy. Charles laughed when I took a misstep on the Charleston, but dancing was hardly my forte. Like most of the other dance floor practitioners we simply spun and flailed with a modicum of rhythm involved. Charles was better at the new dances than I was. I told him that if we were waltzing I would put him to shame. He laughed, resting his head on my shoulder for support.

Then the swinging tempo of the brass ceased. A lone low trumpet sounded and a gentle melody started.

The moment of awkward hesitation I suffered, and thought would suffer for eternity, was thankfully zotzed by Charles. I expected to be led off the dance floor, where we would resume drinking and arguing, but he held up his right hand for the taking.

After a moment’s silence, he pushed out a hip. “Well, hurry up. Or I’m going to lead.”

I put my hand around Charles’ and our bodies snapped up together like two magnets. It was seamless. We curved toward each other. My right hand slid over his hip, flaring out just barely past his waist. I could feel the potential of his body there, where his muscles would dip and curve if I move my hand southerly or easterly. His hand was a bit smaller in mine—the palm almost as wide, but with shorter, dexterous fingers. I had known that, of course, but feeling it was an entirely different event.

For his part, Charles’ shoulders fit just inside the space of mine, just under me. His hand roamed up the sharp arch of my shoulder blade, between my suit jacket and the cape, like a heater. A firm pressure without any prying. It felt more like he was leading me than the reverse.

I suppose the song started out with us close, but apart in a near brushing state. The abridgment of that space was inexorable. There was no dancing anymore. There was only the feel of Charles against my chest, his hair under my nose, and even the starchy press of his mask against my jaw. My hand curled around his waist. Some fleeting sensation of awareness bleated in the back of my mind, telling me I would have to stop. Telling me the end would come, as always. I wanted to destroy that part of me. In that moment, I wanted only that moment. To disappear into the abandon and Charles’ arms. Then the only space between them became measurable only by the distances seen my microscopes and the breath passing between them.

The slow music faded and changed into something else that kicked up a cheer. People started gyrating and lindy hopping in my periphery, but I couldn’t let go of Charles. Much more miraculously, Charles leaned away from me to look me in the eye.

 _Can we go back to your apartment?_ his voice whispered and curled inside my mind.

I couldn’t dare ask to know if he was sure.

Thanks to his gift for obscuring anyone’s mind, we traveled invisible and in each other’s arms to my apartment. The taxi driver saw us, with my arm around Charles’ shoulders and lifting up his mask to see his face clearly and pressing down the curled strands of hair next to his ears, as no more offensive than any man and woman sitting close together, or no one at all. It was wonderful. For the first time in my life I felt un-judged, but it was only because no one could see my face. Without the consolation of Charles nestled against my side, I might have blazed against the injustice.

I never remembered any excitement or preamble to our first lovemaking. If anything, I was nervous. I was afraid of living in a dream of my own making, and then waking up to a cold and empty bed. There was no rush and urgency in an effort to avoid being found out. There was no immediate need to leave the scene of the crime.

We huddled close in the low dark of my apartment. There was only the light from outside my windows and my Bubbe’s old crystal lamp in the living room. Yet I could see every smooth curve and facet of his face, every eyelash. With his beard finally scraped from his face it was embarrassing how youthful he looked. I knew him to be three years younger than me, but he looked like a far too precious age to be with someone like me. Somehow, inconceivable to how I’d always seen people, he looked far too young and ageless all in one fell swoop. As though the tender slope of his jaw, the impish curve of his mouth could have been found at every point in time and always as fresh as it was on his face at that moment.

The word ‘angelic’ resonated, with all its true intent, in me for the first time. I shuddered at the sight of him.

Charles unhooked and shed clothes from me in the bedroom, laying kisses on me as he went. It startled me and made my whole trunk clench in some strange fear, more than anticipation.

His skin glowed warm from the flittering spots of light. His eyes glowed always, always seen and always calling out to me. Within him was cheek and charm and love and brightness. He was intelligent and sweet. He was one of my own, a new man, touching me and plying me on my own bed.

It startled me.

“Charles,” I said, feeling his hair sift through my fingers. “Don’t… I won’t be able to leave you. I can’t have you…”

Charles leaned into me, set his hands running over me, over my shoulders and back. His forehead pressed against mine. “I don’t want to leave you, Erik. I don’t ever want to leave you. I’m never going to let you go.”

I couldn’t remember everything, in all of our touching. We latched on to each other with always searching hands and mouths. It felt like melting, like a few moments of drowning in the ocean as a child, before hitting the sandy floor and pushing back up to the air.

Charles was the oxygen and the ocean.

Without clothes, Charles looked shamefully young. He typically wore thick sweaters and jackets that, though not large even then, made him seem bigger. He had a slight build, very fair skin touched with freckles, and not a great deal of body hair. Though nothing about him was gawky or ill-fitting. He didn’t have long arms or skinny legs, in fact he had round pale thighs that look as inviting as any embrace. Charles had a body of slim muscles touched with a layer of baby fat. There was a small line of brown hairs in the middle of chest, and a sparse patch framing his pale cock. He wasn’t too slender, but he looked about the right size that I might carry him about comfortably if I chose.

And I wanted to. It was a playful thing I imagined husbands did with their wives and suddenly it was the strongest desire thumping through my chest.

I hefted him from the cold floor onto my bed, wanting to indulge in his laughter and his spirit. I flattened myself over him so as much of my skin as possible would touch his skin. His fingers trailed down my spine until he grabbed a hold of my buttocks, squeezing each side and pulling my hips even further against him.

Evidently Charles caught my surprise, because he laughed and mouthed a mark at my neck. He spoke with an extra squeeze. “I told you I wouldn’t let you go.”

Our lovemaking was only enraptured rutting against each other like inexperienced boys—our hands wet with lotion and laughing at every touch. But it was true lovemaking like I had never had before, filled with joy and honesty. It filled my mind with a thousand little flashes of Charles’ eyes, his breath against my cheek, and his nose brushing against mine. It filled my mind and blocked out every horrible sight and degradation, and every taste of ash that had ever filled my mouth.

When I woke, I woke to my legs tangled between Charles’ under a quilt. Charles was shivering. The sound of the radio from the other room was drifting in. He stuck his cold toes under my ankle, catapulting me into a vibrantly awake state. He was tucked against my side, squeezing my ribs for all he was worth.

“You’re awfully thin,” he muttered into my underarm, his hands grasping around my middle, searching for skin to pinch.

“You’re awfully cold.”

“I dashed out to turn on the radio. You’ve got to turn up your radiator.”

“Why didn’t you do that while you were up?”

“Why would I fiddle around with a radiator when I could curl up next to you?”

I laughed and had to bury my nose into his hair, and hug his shoulders as tightly as I could, just to make sure it was really him, not some dream. But he was a real weight and really Charles at my side, under my covers.

“This is… You’re not going to disappear, are you?”

Charles stilled for a moment, and then kissed a bit of my shoulder. “I’m done pretending we should’ve been doing anything other than this.”

For a long moment, there was just silence. All the silence there could be, with the sound of people milling and cars chugging along already building up a wall of noise outside the apartment. All I could hear was the blissful sound of Charles’ breathing near the side of my face, and the rustle of his hair whenever he shifted, with the radio chiming in the background.

Without thinking, my mouth opened and I said, “I’m happy that you’re here. I’m happy. Thank you.”

A feeling came off of Charles that was obviously more than the simple language of his body. He was giving me something with his ability—something delicate and huge at the same time. Something stronger and more articulate than words, but indescribable. A warm, content feeling that nestled into my bones like it was Charles, himself, distilled.

Then he hummed with the radio and half whispered, half sung, “ _Blue days, all of them gone… Nothing but blue skies, from now on_.”

 

 

 


	2. I should smile, that's exactly what I do

  


 

_“Some day I’ll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me.”_

Letters, Delivered and Read

 

_January 1st, 1931_

My Darling Erik,

I feel a queer bravery today, my love. I think it’s due to this being the anniversary of the last time I did. I may in fact send you this letter. Unlike all the others I have written, I’ve bought postage for this one. You probably know the Depression has not hit me as hard as it has others, but I still don’t feel right about wasting supplies. Since this note that may actually greet your eyes, I shall summarize what I have in a previous collection of dozens of discarded messages:

I still love you. I grieve you every day. Most importantly, I am sorry.

You called me your little husband once. You called me your little owl.

This morning I slipped my ring on and off my finger what must have been a dozen times, and touched it endlessly throughout the day. I reread the inscription; or rather I thought it, repeating it in my mind over and over again. As though I might change the words or the intent by finding some new dimension to explain why we’re apart. Some days I wear it; some days I cannot. Those days I am too angry or too sad, and the slightest thought of you makes me feel like I’m unfurling, like I am a black cloud that will suffocate the world.

Every memory of your affection haunts me. Everything that serves as a reminder of your love only further serves to remind me that you’re not here. There are some days still— _still_ , my love—where I cannot breathe without forgetting and remembering you will not greet me in bed at night. You will not touch me in the morning.

It was on this day two years ago we finally came together. Yet it seems like we have been apart for decades upon decades. Part of me wonders if I ever stopped writing these letters I never send if it would hurt less, if the time would move more quickly like it used to. There are no masquerades or parties as there used to be, but even if there were attending them would be a hollow event without you in my life.

I thought that after a time I wouldn’t want for you so. I suppose the hurt is less than what it was, though that was treated with anger more than it is now. I simply thought _time heals all wounds_. Yet here I sit, with a festering in my side that simply won’t heal. I won’t lie. I’ve talked about them in all of the other letters I have never sent you, but some of those were thrown in the fire, so I’ll tell you again. I have taken other lovers since you left. I know any amount would drive you mad but it wasn’t so many. Only three; two women and a man.

I think I only had them to scrape the taste of you from my tongue.

You’ll be happy to know it didn’t work. As I say, it only reminded me of your absence. For all I do and all I have, all I can see is the lack of you.

Every day that I step out of my door, I wonder what I would do if I came upon you. I think it’s a foolish routine. Of course, I’ve done a great deal to avoid you. I would feel you coming for a mile. There is no reason to work out the little one-act plays of encountering you that I’ve done in my mind. In my more fevered dreams, I pretend that we can meet each other civilly and coolly. We might even exchange words on the weather and kiss each other’s cheeks as we left.

I wildly imagine I can possess tame feelings for you.

You and I both know that can never be, darling. For us it is only fire or ice. I think there is no plane of existence where we can live both apart and at peace.

Yet I still fear there is no way we can live together and at peace.

Do you think of these things, I wonder? Do you imagine our potential crossings? Knowing you, they are scenes of brimstone and violence and steel. Or perhaps, do you still wish to lie with me in the silence, with the morning sounds still far off in the distance? Do you remember those moments of stillness at the summerhouse under the stars, when it was only you and I and everything was perfect?

I hope that one-day, even if you never see me again, I can convince that all I ever want for you is that measure of peace. I am sorry, my dear. Please forgive me. I beg you, return to me. Everything else is insignificant. All that matters is that you’re with me again.

Your beloved,

Charles 

 

 

_“This debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile”_

A Different Crash of ‘29

 

In March of 1929, I was lying in bed next to Erik when he finally told me his real name.

Of course I knew his real name. But it was a matter of both pride and embarrassment to Erik that he had a Jewish name and let himself be convinced that he shouldn’t use it, so I hadn’t let on that I knew. I knew at some point he would tell me. The revelation of things was important to Erik in a way that it never had been for me.

I tried to let people tell me things when I could.

“My name is Max Eisenhardt,” he said in his low, broken voice, as though we were being introduced for the first time. “I’ve wanted to tell you that since I first met you.”

I had remembered that too. A handsome stranger, more or less, watching me all night with confused intent—desire, exclusion, loneliness, kinship. The internal tenor of Erik’s mind was so much more sensitive than he wanted to believe. So I approached him and in a whisper of his thoughts was a picture of him sweeping me off my feet, as though we’d been transported into the middle of a bizarre flicker, where the bad man with good intentions got his man and they lived happily ever after. _My name is Max Eisenhardt. Come away with me,_ he’d said.

How could I be anything but enchanted?

I kissed the side of his face. “Is that what you’d like me to call you?”

He shrugged. “It isn’t really me anymore.”

He thought of fire, with ashes twirling through the sky like a woman’s skirt. He thought of fire often. He had told me once about the Fire that killed his mother, but woodenly, in a manufactured haze of distance. I could feel it. He thought of himself as something different than what he was as a child, when his world changed and grew much too wide in too short a time. Broaching the topic aloud pushed him back so he couldn’t see how heartbreakingly similar he was to that boy.

“In my head,” I confessed. I was getting better at telling parts of myself with Erik. “You don’t have a name at all. No one does. Not deep down. Someone is what they are, a jumble of feelings and sensations, and the name comes a long much further down the thinking process. It’s not a pure thing, at all, a name.”

“You’re saying it doesn’t matter what I’m called.”

I shrugged. To Erik, names mattered a great deal.

“How do I sensate to you, then?”

I touched his forehead, and smoothed over his left eyebrow with my thumb. I didn’t need to touch him in order to show him, but it helped focus me, as though I were actually giving a physical thing. And I put in his mind how I saw him. Not simply how he looked, a contradictory, beautiful architecture of both delicately thin and fiercely strong limbs and bones, but what he was made of—passion, vigor, anger, great love and great hatred, loyalty, and a strong disdain for injustice. He was a sphere of powerful, intense colors in shades of dark red and vibrant purple. He was heat and heart and the sound of a monumental chorus, something huge and riotous made out of delicate individual parts. Of course, Erik had no comparison, but I liked to think he was something like _The Rite of Spring_.

When I pulled away far enough to see again, Erik was looking like he could see the whole world through me, almost childlike in his unabashed reverence. He thought of his mother and his aunt and his childhood; when things were good. It made me feel sheepish, in a way. He was plainly overestimating me. Of course I also basked in his admiration.

After a silence where he collected himself, Erik said, “I don’t know how Max sounds in your voice.”

So I said it, watching his pupils focus in on my lips.

“Say the other one.”

“Erik,” I said, feeling a grin steal over my lips. Erik could always make me smile, just from the insights and turns of his mind.

“Do they both feel like what you showed me?”

I put my hand over the side of his face, cupping the corner of his distinguished jaw. “That’s you. That’s always you.” I kissed him.

There was some niggling feeling inside him that did not believe me. Some times I thought Erik was incapable of thinking good things about himself, but he didn’t dispute it. He nodded and pulled me tighter in his arms as though we were never going to leave the bed.

Most of the time, I wish we never had.

While I had grown closer to Erik, closer than I had ever thought or wanted, I simultaneously lived a lie. A separate life that no one knew about.

A year before I’d even met Erik I started working for the Bureau of Investigation, using my ability to find other mutants who were using their powers to undermine the law.

It was an odd job. One I had never planned on for myself.

I had been going to University, studying Biology, then Genetics. That was the path I had carved out for myself from a young age. I wanted to provide the necessary research and prove to the scientific community the existence of mutants. Speculation had existed in the latter part of the old Century, and, colloquially, even long before that. I wanted to show that we were the next stage of adaptation, an extension of the human family. However, the Head of my department out right refused to hear anything about how the next advancement in evolution came out of random gene mutations. He was a staunch advocate of eugenics as science’s firm future.

It made me so angry. Eugenics was a particular peeve of mine, but it happened to be all the rage. I knew from first hand experience with telepathy that no person was inherently inferior or superior to another. Minds were equally dim or dazzling across all races and sexes—and economic groups for that matter. I _knew_ that to be true in a way that was irrefutable, but incommunicable.

I had an unfortunate lapse in judgment, and during an argument, showed him my telepathy and what I knew from it. Of course the sudden revelation of my ability caused him to panic. We had been in his office at school at the time and he fell out of his chair, scrambling away from me, and clutching the model skull on his desk that I swore he was going to try hitting me with. I tried to calm him down, but he was hysterical. In the end I had to wipe the entire incident from his memory.

Realizing that with the majority of the Genetics field was populated by proponents of eugenics, I dropped out of my program and decided to return to America.

Raven had been proud of me in my plans to discover more about mutants, but more delighted to return to the States. It was the only home she had ever known. The only part of England she had barely liked was London. I had been set on perhaps going to another school, studying Psychology instead, but I was barely in America three weeks before a woman in a conservative wool coat and a tam o’shanter came up to me in a bar to ask me about mutations.

Even though was a little ossified at the time, I had enough wits about me to take a quick peak into her mind and see that she meant the kind of mutations I was talking about. She had images of a trim, suspicious man with a graying mustache, a woman made of living crystal, and a devil that walked and spoke like a human, but popped in and out of thin air.

The woman was well dressed and mannerly, but old-fashioned and decidedly not posh. The gloves on her hands were old and darned, but she held it out proudly for a handshake. “You’re Charles Xavier. I read your paper. I’m Moira MacTaggert.”

And in a few short weeks I was working for the Bureau of Investigation, their very own telepathic mutant hound.

For nearly a year, I was content to do it because it was something I could do as a mutant. I didn’t need to hide my ability; in fact I was valuable because of it. I wound up exploring the boundaries of my telepathy more in that year than I had since I was a child. Not only was I reaching out into minds further and further from me, but I was also using my gifts for a common good.

The Bureau of Investigation had begun as an institution to police prostitution, but had since expanded to combat the illegal production and distribution of alcohol. I was never a teetotal, and certainly no prohibitionist, but the crime rings that sold the alcohol also typically ran gambling rackets, prostitutes, and sometimes money laundering circuits. And in particular, the Bureau was looking to end a multitude of crime by putting away Sebastian Shaw—a murderer, drug dealer, pimp, and bootlegger. The heads of the Bureau may have been more interested in upholding prohibition, but I was interested in stopping a dangerous criminal who could only spoil the outside world against mutants when the day eventually came that mutants would be widely acknowledged as reality, not hearsay and urban myth.

Of course, Shaw had a telepath on his crew, which made my job infinitely harder. There would be no surreptitious spying on Shaw from afar.

Therefore the plan was to make myself known. To be engaged with these people somehow to be close to them and find out what I could. Fortune had it that I was better suited for such a position than an undercover agent anyway. I had a family name, wealth, and presence in New York long before that operation. I had dropped out of school, but had more than enough money to ensure I didn’t need to work. Adopting the persona of the louche son of a socialite, slightly run amok with the family money, throwing parties and entertaining bootleggers, wasn’t a difficult one to making convincing. I could even play the piano well enough to be at all the places I needed to be to find out about Shaw and the crimes of his crew.

Then came Erik.

From the first time he saw me, I knew he was interested in me. He choreographed it with every look. I was determined to pay him no mind. At that first garden party at Emma’s he was watching me for perhaps no more than five minutes. I could feel him the entire time. Rather I could feel the pull of him.

I don’t want to say that some minds are more interesting than others. It is more a matter of compatibility. Some people are drawn to certain others for reasons that defy logic. Well, for reasons that defy logic from an outside perspective. Such is the draw of a compatible heart. It was something I could see in other pairs at times. I could see a young man and woman who barely knew each other come together like puzzle pieces, or two magnets. It wasn’t necessarily romantic or sexual. I had seen just as many people truly grasp to one another as friends and peers, if not more in friendship than as lovers.

Even in that short presence while I refused to look at him more than twice, I could feel his pull as surely as the moon felt the tide.

Then he walked away to collect the money from a man waiting inside, who had operated a saloon for Shaw.

Emma drifted over to me after my set, the delight of knowing secrets in her eyes.

“Did you see him?” she said. “The tall drink of water with the eyes full of woe.”

I nodded, remaining silent and blank. Talking to her required more diligence in protecting my mind than I had ever taken before. A conversation with Emma was like running to Marathon. I rather enjoyed the challenge.

“I think you’re his type.”

“Really, Emma,” I chided with no real intent. I loved keeping her impression of me as ambiguous as possible when I could.

I knew that Shaw didn’t really on Erik for as much as he did Emma or Azazel. Erik was a multi-faceted tough, however. I gathered he took care of people in a rather physical way, made connections for Shaw, and acted as Shaw’s bodyguard on a regular basis. I knew he had likely committed murders under Shaw’s employ.

Yet when I saw him again, his mind still called out to me. It baffled me how someone with such a keen, sensitive mind could be a common criminal. He followed me from house to house where I played, his lonely, aching thoughts plaguing me from the dark corners he hid in. I got to know him while he watched me from afar. I learned about his history, his disdain for the world’s unfairness, his strange resolution to bring about the new world order through destruction of the old.

I felt sorry for him, and compelled by him. So I did what I shouldn’t have done and sought him out.

After that, things developed frighteningly quickly.

Erik absolutely oozed affection for me. It was addictive to be near. Though, of course, he had appeal in his own right. He was very clever. A proper opponent in chess. He yearned so strongly to have a family. His Jewish family was no more; his identity abandoned in his mind. He wanted people like himself so very badly. I guessed that given the right push, he would be willing to change.

I didn’t have the heart to deny him the opportunity.

So while we became genuine friends, I did my part to keep him away from the Bureau’s attention. He wasn’t an innocent, but I was sure that if Shaw were taken out of the situation Erik would happily try to lead a life under the law.

It was until Agent Smith was killed, due to Shaw’s suspicion of a mole in his midst, and I was pulled away from the case, that I realized how deeply Erik had sunk into my heart.

I spent months away from Erik. More than I needed to. In reality, I hadn’t gone far out of the City, but to a safe house. From there Emma couldn’t detect me. After a time I was allowed to go to the Capital and to my family home in Westchester. The whole time I was angry and frustrated that I wasn’t more worried about Raven and the lies I had been telling her. Or that I wasn’t more worried about how Shaw’s network would proceed since they had discovered somehow information was being leaked and various suppliers of theirs were being arrested. In that regard I did worry about Erik’s safety. I made sure to pester Moira for updates, and ask Erik in letters as discretely as I could, and check on him telepathically whenever I was sure Emma was out of town.

I could only think of him, how badly being away from him hurt, how much I hated lying to him.

It wasn’t until having lunch with Moira at the safe house one day I even realized how love struck I had been.

She caught sight of a letter I had been writing to Erik that morning.

“Charles,” she said urgently, casting me an imploring look. “You have to be careful with this letter. What would happen if it was searched?”

She knew that I was partly homosexual. By some strange irony, it was one of the things I told her about myself the night we slept together, some two months on in our friendship. Moira was something of a radical in conservative clothing. She was the only female agent in the Bureau of Investigation. Until she’d been moved up to the prohibition sting on Shaw, she had pretended to be a prostitute for three years, arresting men who attempted to hire her services. As a result she put nearly twice as many offenders in jail on average as any one of her male counterparts.

I folded the letter over, taking it out of her sight. “There are no names, nor any references to masculine body parts. It isn’t obscene. I only ever refer to him as ‘you.’”

“But it is suggestive. That could be used against you.”

“In what event? I don’t plan on running for civil office, Moira.”

“I’ve seen men blackmailed for less. Anyone out for money, or out to ruin your name, could use that against you.”

“What if I refused to pay in to my mythical extortionist?” Off Moira’s sour look, I apologized. It was none of her fault for the way I was feeling. “I’m sorry. I just don’t see what would be so terrible about being known as a man with homosexual tastes.”

Erik talked about it all the time. He talked about the world in terms of hiding and fighting and refused to see anything else. I knew there was too much compromise, too many elements to be clearly cut. Yet a small part of me wanted to see it the way Erik did. There would be such satisfaction in knowing the world was entirely wrong, and bucking against it. It would be a great joy to say _this is who I am and I question it for no man_ , as Erik so dearly wanted.

“There is nothing wrong with it,” Moira said. “Not in my opinion. But it isn’t my opinion that matters.”

I never flaunted it, but there were people I knew whom I could trust with that information. Or rather, in certain circles in, especially in the Village, it was very nearly vogue to be somewhat queer. In controlled spaces, being a little homosexual was not so dangerous. That wasn’t true everywhere. I never worried for myself. I kept a good eye out for danger and could distill that threat with a thought. Yet I still worried for my sister and Angel, and others I had met. I worried for Armando, even though he was incapable of being hurt physically.

I worried dearly for Erik. And clearly Moira could read it on my face.

“You picked a bad queer to fall for, Xavier,” she said, but there was no cruelty in her voice. Certainly there was none in her head. There was something both rueful and sympathetic in her that belied a bad past.

“I care for Erik a great deal. I won’t deny that, but we haven’t the sort of relationship you’re thinking of. We love each other as friends.”

“You headed your letter with ‘my darling.’”

“There is nothing wrong with using a term of endearment for a beloved friend.”

Moira looked at me in disbelief. “He’s a murderer, Charles. The way you speak of him one would think he’s a saint.”

“I’ve never said any such thing. I know his rough edges, but he’s never killed under his own steam. That was all Shaw’s doing. He doesn’t know anything else. It’s only that no one else knows him as well as I do. He wants a better life for mutants.”

“He’s going to get himself arrested or killed.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it.”

Moira’s eyes widened at my statement.

“He’s taken to the thought of mutants’ rights very keenly, Moira. If I can get him to give up this life, what he does for Shaw, he’d let it go forever. I know he would. He’s far too intelligent to just be a thug and Shaw’s bagman.”

“And a killer.”

Feeling a warming flash of hesitation and fear, I said, “I know he isn’t an altruist, but he never once killed anyone who wasn’t himself a killer… Everyone deserves a second chance.”

Moira shrugged. “You don’t need to convince me of anything. Shaw is our target. And I’m not a pacifist.”

I wasn’t either in any true sense. Many people assumed it of me because I leaned in that direction. I would have always preferred to end confrontations non-violently, but I knew it wasn’t the way of the world. A good pacifist would’ve tried harder to change Erik and wouldn’t have participated in the underworld of violence and illegality I lived in. Even though I was attempting to put Shaw and his men behind bars, I would let the agents I worked with use their guns to a fatal end.

But not against Erik.

Moira shook her head. As with so many occasions of weakness before, I couldn’t prevent myself from succumbing to my interest. I took a sneaking look into Moira’s current thoughts about me.

Seeing what she saw of me was a shock.

In her mind I looked a wreck. My beard was reaching proportions that extended far past _unshaven_ , and not neat or combed either. There were blue circles under my eyes. I looked even paler than usual. I was preoccupied, chewing on my lower lip and nails, wearing the same two sets of worn clothing I’d left my apartment with in a dash to safety, despite having gone from D.C. to the safe house more than once. I didn’t smell pleasant. I smelled like smoke and booze. In Moira’s reflection of me I could also see the comparison of what I usually looked like, the _before Erik_ look, as she called it. It was her impression of me when we first met. I was wearing a nice dark blue jacket and brown slacks, waistcoat, and a flat cap tilted to the side. Then I was chipper, handsome, and flirtatious; I winked at Moira whenever she left the room. Now she saw me as sick with love, distracted, and possibly dangerous on the job.

 _What would he risk for Erik?_ she wondered, concerned for her own job if she didn’t say something about the risk I was presenting, and afraid to out my homosexual activity to the Bureau and get me put in jail.

I shut the thought out so violently Moira could see something change on my face, making her suspicious.

“Are you o-kay?”

I nodded, trying slow my own heart thumping in my chest. “Fine.”

After she left, I looked in the mirror. The image I saw was much closer to what Moira saw than how I had been thinking of myself.

As soon as the Bureau could establish the status of Shaw’s gang and do their necessary paperwork, I went back into the City. I went to see Erik.

Remaining friends, and only friends, with him was of the utmost importance to me. He had yearned for belonging for so long. While I had left he developed a rapport with the other mutants in our circle. It was important to him; it was necessary for him. I feared the possibility of gaining him as lover, only to lose him as a lover, making our mutual friendships untenable. If he had no other people to rely on, he would only drive himself further into isolation and desperation.

Knowing he was capable of so much more, I couldn’t risk that for him.

Yet in the days leading up to the New Year’s ball at Webster, I kept thinking of those horrid last moments in his apartment after he’d come across Armando and I—a foolish decision I’d only made to get Erik out of my head. I kept thinking of Erik’s hurt, terse tone and his bitter laugh about sex being only fleeting. I’d seen it reflected in his mind before. Erik saw sex as seedy and unfulfilling in any other sense than physical. Part of him hated sex. Sex was the reason why queers were hated, and part of him he would never admit to aloud agreed with that reasoning.

I made my effort to get him to consider other men, but as New Year’s Eve ticked on, I found myself more and more powerless to leave his side. With the absinthe tingling in my blood, and the intoxicating closeness of our first slow dance, with his hand at the small of my back pulling me closer to him, I could feel my resolve evaporating.

Waking up that morning, the beginning of a new year and a new life, was like something had finally fallen into place. It was like that first magnetic pull I had felt from him in the summer finally connected. We were together, belonging as a set.

It felt right and correct. I felt it down to my bones.

That first day we spent together was wonderful.

We touched each other as though we might never have the opportunity. We luxuriated in each other’s nakedness. For the first time I truly got to see his form. His wide, masculine shoulders and his narrow waist. He had long, slender limbs that carried a graceful energy. He was very thin, obviously touched by his childhood poverty, too thin, but was at the same time muscular. It seemed like difficult, hard won muscle. As dedicated as he was, he seemed to me like he could’ve been a dancer or a toreador or some other beautiful physical thing.

During midday, the cold was beating outside the walls and windows. I could feel it just there, at those barriers between us and civility. I slid my palms over his legs, from ankle to thigh, memorizing the feeling of him, where the muscle was most firm or most yielding, the irrefutable strength of his tendons.

I sat near his feet as he looked down at me, half aroused and half baffled. I kissed his knee and muttered, “What was that passage? About his legs. In _Song of Songs_.”

Erik shook his head fondly. “I’ve no idea.”

“His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold,” I tried. Song of Songs had never been part of our recitations in school. I simply read it, knowing it was supposed to be naughty. Being a telepathic child slightly warps one’s definition of naughty, but I had enjoyed it nonetheless. It was by far the most engaging book of the Bible. “His countenance as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.”

I was memorizing him. Taking him in for when I needed him most.

“I have no idea what that means,” he said with a smile I had never seen on his face before.

“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

“That I know.”

He said the phrase in Hebrew. I had never heard Hebrew spoken before, other than a few words during catechism, and neither did it register with me as sounds. I had trained myself to hear the intent and thought when people spoke in other languages, automatically filtering away the foreign sounds. I felt the buzz of belonging and desire, and saw an image of a little boy carefully making out the calligraphy of an unfamiliar alphabet in little turns.

Erik pulled me up by the shoulders and kissed the side of my face. “You and your poetry.”

“You’re beautiful,” I said, shocking him into stillness.

“No,” he said, holding up his hands, palms up, as though confused what to do with me.

He was pulsing with the memories of his childhood, of leaving school for work, of the Jews in his neighborhood who wore coal black wool hats and spoke broken English, and the soot flaking over charred dresses, and men and boys he’d bludgeoned with his fists and pipes and killed, and men and boys he’d taken to bed. He didn’t think he was beautiful, but he was. He thought he was wreckage—the debris from a burnt out building.

“No, not like that,” I said. “Like this.”

I pulled him around me, pressing my chest next to his and sweeping fingers around the side of his face. I placed in his mind how people’s minds looked to me. It wasn’t unlike a poem. People as they were, memories and ideas, the psyche, were streams of data constantly progressing and regressing. They were always changing and being rewritten, endlessly different and endlessly complex. Seeing that process filled me such joy that it was beyond language. It was only communicable through telepathy and I had never shared it with anyone but Erik. It was the most intimate part of me.

“What you have written in you is always changing, Erik, and it is not ugly. You’re capable of great things, good and terrible. But so are we all.”

He seemed too overwhelmed by that to speak. He simply stared at me with an awed expression I knew I didn’t deserve. So I took him by the hand, and lead him back to bed. We stayed in Erik’s apartment, away from the world. I was only getting an inkling then, but the very best moments those first years would always be just Erik and I, alone together. It gave Erik so much pleasure and relief. It was almost like he was a different person when we were finally together, embracing happiness like he never could before.

Even though being with Erik in that way, finally becoming both friends and lovers, felt instinctually right, the effect was somewhat lessened for me. In order to even spend New Year’s Eve together unbothered, I had to _persuade_ a number of people to go about not noticing us, not least of all, Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost. I had stayed my distance and not pushed my interference too far. I simply gave a subtle instruction that Erik was not needed. If they didn’t think he was needed, they wouldn’t look for him.

Or at least I had hoped.

So the blissful alone time I spent with him that day was marred by the constant humming awareness in the back of my mind of those minds I had altered, and by wondering how I could keep them away.

And that dual reality that my life became, living in love and light with Erik while keeping him unaware of my work with the Bureau, was not to relent any time soon.

As winter moved on, life began to resume to more like it had been before my Bureau regulated hiatus. There were parties to be had. There were nightclubs to play at, while I gleaned information about Shaw’s gang, and where and when their crimes were being committed. Erik slowly moved down the ranks, due to gentle nudging from me. I was learning to slip unnoticed past Emma’s attentions when I was gentle and precise enough. Meanwhile, Erik and the others were becoming more involved in creating their newsletter, thinking of ways they could reach all the mutants in Manhattan, possibly the whole City.

Erik came to my apartment one day in late January with a smirk on his face, melting snowflakes on his hat and shoulders, and an idea. He took off his hat and sent it sailing for the dining table, where it hit the partially drawn curtain and fell to the floor. He grinned fully, showing off all his teeth, before giving me a welcoming kiss.

“You’re in a rather good mood.”

“I know how we can reach all the mutants in New York,” he said, pulling me half into a waltz over the tiny scuffed dance floor of my sitting room.

“How?”

“You.” He grinned again. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. You can read minds at a good reach. Much farther than Emma can.”

“Well, yes, but individually checking every person in the City to see if he’s a mutant? That sounds exhausting, as well as potentially quite grim.”

“You wouldn’t need to with that radio machine Hank was talking about. It would amplify you. Make it so you could just see them all at once, wouldn’t it?”

“Potentially, my dove, but that machine doesn’t exist.”

Erik all of a sudden gathered my weight with his arm and dipped me, moving his face in close to mine. “Not yet it doesn’t, my little owl. We’re going to build it.” When he pulled me back up into a stand, he spun me close to him. “Then we’re going to find all the mutants we can to tell them what you told me. That they’re not alone. Won’t it be wonderful, Charles?”

While in the back of my mind I couldn’t ignore the possibility of people who wanted to remain unfound, or mutants we might accidentally put in danger by finding them, I felt his enthusiasm and intentions making me warm with glee. And in that regard, Erik and I genuinely agreed. Other mutants had a right to know they weren’t alone.

Throughout February, I got messages to and from the Bureau as usual. There was no concern amongst Shaw’s gang that I was the one figuring out their plots, or responsible for the last raid by the police. If Emma had any suspicions she kept them far too close to the vest for me to glean.

In the evenings I played piano, while Erik went on errands for Shaw. Fewer and fewer of those errands having to do with disposing of bodies. I could no longer tell if it was a simple matter of subconsciously making the world to my liking, or if Shaw was beginning to trust Erik less. Both were quietly horrifying prospects, adding to the burden of things I desperately wanted to tell Erik but couldn’t.

Even later in the evenings and the earliest of morning, in the dark charcoal skies tinged with blue and the orange of the coming sun, with chatter and a cloud of neon light leaking from gin joint to gin joint, Erik and I would walk through the streets of Manhattan. Sometimes pointlessly and sometimes with intent. Sometimes giddy from booze and sometimes stone cold sober. We would watch other illicit passersby, similarly incapable of judgment for our mixed states of exposure and concealment in the open night. We would watch the new high rises, the skyscrapers, hammer and hew at the earliest pink and blue light of dawn. Erik could feel the cranes and pulleys and steel girders being lifted to dizzying heights.

And I could feel the minds of those men, working on platforms hundreds of feet above the earth, both unnerved by and accustomed to the dangerous novelty.

“I could pull the right beam and bring the whole thing to the ground in under a minute,” Erik muttered once.

I was quite familiar with his heavy, sullen moods. The ache he felt from being in disconnect with the world. How he hated terrible things so much, but could only think how he might destroy them.

I linked my arm with his, pulling him closer to me. “And how long do you think it would take to build it?”

He smiled wryly. “Oh much longer. Hours, at least.”

“Maybe you should.”

“You think I should build the Bank of Manhattan Trust building.”

“I think you should build the tallest building in New York and call it the Erik Lehnsherr Building for the Progression of Mutant Rights.”

He laughed at that, slipping his arm around my waist. “The world where that where the whole world watches the building of that place is a very different one from ours.”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s just the one waiting for us to make. Maybe it’s not that far off as all that.”

Instinctively I knew that Erik didn’t believe me, but he didn’t voice his disbelief, which was as close as I could get to acquiescence with Erik some days. He only placed a silent, surreptitious kiss on the top of my head.

Giving Erik some positive perspective, trying to convince him that world wasn’t only filled with hatred and evils, was a hard task. One he most certainly disagreed with me about, but it was necessary. It pleased me greatly that despite our differences we could still find love in each other. I was beginning to think I would be still trying to convince Erik of the goodness of humans when I was old and gray, only that it was no longer a thought that filled me exasperation. It filled me with not a small amount of satisfaction.

The problem was that I could imagine no future wherein I’d told Erik I was working for the government to put a stop to mutant criminals. Our lives crept onward, with Erik and I living hand in hand, as close a lover as I ever had. At nighttimes I would feel the tension in his chest release as he spilled secrets about his past, about his fears of humankind and their abuse of the poor and the different.

With March came a new directive from the Bureau, an order that almost went past me, and would have if not for Moira’s fondness for me.

She sent me a cable, asking to meet. There was a particular bar in Brooklyn we attended for our more clandestine meetings. A precaution Moira insisted on, even though I could obscure us anywhere.

As soon as she sat down across from me, she leaned over the table, and said, “There’s going to be a bust tonight. A big one. They’re hitting all three of Shaw’s smaller places and The Caspartina.”

“Tonight! Moira, that’s…” It was incredibly short notice. It was nearly noon. But more disconcertingly, Erik was working at The Caspartina later that night. I didn’t even know for certain if I would be able to get a hold of him before he left for work. “That’s no time at all!”

Moira nodded, “I could only just get away. I can’t be longer than an hour.” Then she looked at me gravely. I knew what she was going to say before she even stretched her vocal cords and it gripped me in shock. It shouldn’t have. I’d thought of it many times before and knew eventually it might come to this point. Yet the reality of it struck me dumb.

“Lehnsherr is on the arrest list.”

Erik would definitely be with Shaw. There was a reason why the Bureau was so interested in putting him behind bars. Shaw was dangerous, bribed the City’s police force, and had killed several of his competitors and several government agents. During a raid like this with over a dozen officers, there would likely be casualties. If Erik were responsible for the death of a Bureau employee, he would become far more wanted for arrest than he already was. If he got away, which I considered likely, he would become a fugitive from the federal government and there would be no second chances.

“Can you talk to them?” I pled, reaching for Moira’s hand, but she evaded me.

“And say what, Charles? He’s Shaw’s hitman. He’s a murderer. He was bound to get pinched eventually. You knew that.” She sighed, looking at me like I was the saddest sight in the world, which may not have been far off. “I’m only telling you because I want you to stay the hell away from there. No one thought you needed to know. So you’re lucky no one suspects Lehnsherr is your friend.”

I nodded blindly, my stomach rising up in my throat. Moira was none too pleased with me, but she was also looking at me with sympathy. Of course, she had a great deal of fondness for me.

More the fool her, I thought bitterly, steeling myself and focusing my mind.

She added, “Don’t do anything stupid,” almost as though she were the mind reader.

I reached for hand again, this time successfully, and softly laid a kiss on the top of her hand. “Thank you for telling me.”

She looked at me with burgeoning suspicion, but nodded anyway. “You’re welcome.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“What for—Charles.”

Before she could finish her sentence, I stilled her mind. For a moment I was unsure of what to do. I had very little time. I thought for a moment of making her destroy any files with my name on them back at Headquarters, but all the other agents I’d talked to would still remember me. Dealing with the Bureau would have to be for a later date. I pressed her hand flat on the table and put my hand over hers, using the touch to focus my abilities into action.

“Have a cup of coffee and return to work as usual,” I said steadily, feeling the command sink into her mind as it were her own thought. “Forget my face and all thoughts of me until someone else mentions my name. You won’t remember this conversation until you can’t find me at my apartment.”

I had no intention of being anywhere with the realm of Manhattan by the time one of Moira’s cohorts thought to wonder where I might be after their raid on Shaw’s businesses. And I would be taking Erik with me.

I faltered before leaving and whispered, “I’m sorry” to her still blank face.

As soon as I was outside, I dashed down the street to hail a taxicab. On the drive over to The Caspartina I tried to hold on to the tenuous calm in my mind, but it was difficult. I could feel other minds slipping into view like shards of light. I was going to be taxed more strenuously than I had been since I was a child. I needed to be prepared. I needed to make a plan.

All my seams felt taut and about to unravel.

In all honesty I did not know what I would do when I found Erik. I didn’t know what I would tell him. I had felt the tug of him leaving me when Moira said they were going to arrest him, and everything about the taste and hue of that idea repulsed me. I refused to let my imagination flit further down that path.

Outside The Caspartina, I let my mind wander for a cursory sweep around the area to see who was there. Erik was not, unfortunately, but to my surprise Shaw was. He also had the man who could make windstorms with him and somewhere away, possibly in the basement, was the boy who had come into our ever-expanding sphere of mutant acquaintances during my absence, Alex. I didn’t have a great deal of time for polity, so I gently pulled a thread of his attention toward me at the alley entrance.

He opened the door with a slightly concerned look on his face. “Charles?”

“I left my violin in the dressing room, remember? I need to go get it for a gig tonight.”

I stopped Alex’ mind from wondering if I even played the violin, and he nodded, opening the door wider for me to come in. He started to follow me to the dressing room, thinking about asking me some things he’d wanted to know about Armando, but I cut him off.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “It’s alright. I know my way around. You have to go back to work anyway.”

I felt terrible as I saw the idea work its way into his thoughts, but I needed to be alone. I sat down in the dressing room and looked at my image in the vanity mirror for a moment. I looked panicked and guilty and more like a child than I could bear.

I shut my eyes and focused on the other room. There was Janos, whose native language I could parse through translating if I had the time, the heated liquid presence of Shaw’s mind, and a sharp absence I hadn’t paid attention to before. It was an absence and not, but more importantly it was the sharp edges of Emma Frost’s crystalline form, naturally repulsing my ability. I tried to adjust my breathing back down to a calm, slow pace.

All I had to do was avoid her, keep my own thoughts subdued. Be subtle, calm. I had only been around Emma while she was crystallized once before, but she didn’t seem to be able to reach out with her telepathy as much as when she was flesh and blood. Of course, she still could control minds and implant thoughts in either form, but she was not as skilled in the extension of her ability as I was.

I focused on Shaw’s mind and whispered into it a swath of feelings and messages that amounted to: _Erik isn’t important. Erik Lehnsherr means little to your establishment. He’s not even going to be here tonight. He knows nothing. Let him go._

For a moment, in the quiet, I waited. I waited for sounds or suspicion, anything that might signify I was giving myself away. I felt around the razor edges of Emma’s mind without trying to press up or brush against her awareness. I looked through Janos’ eyes. They were having some discussion about dues and a brothel on 17th Street.

None of them seemed aware of me.

Finally letting out a breath, I stood, collected myself, and walked through the hallway back to the door leading to the alley. Before I got there I felt an echo of something craggy, knowing it was Emma’s mind. I had only a moment to lock all my thoughts about Erik and Moira and my job away before she announced herself.

_Hello, Charles. What are you doing here?_

There was certain smugness to the feel of her mind. I told myself it didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t given anything away. She always felt that way.

I pushed all the calm and kindness I could muster toward her, trying to cloud my fears like a perfume. _Oh, nothing. Silly, really. I was looking for…_ Having to switch from the lie I told Alex panicked me for a moment and I scrambled for an image. All I could come up with was money. _My wallet. I lost it._

_Why would you think it was here? Weren’t you here days ago?_

The rocky defensive wall of her mind was as solid as ever so I couldn’t glean more than what she would let me. I couldn’t feel her worming into my mind, so I continued walking. A man free of guilt would keep going where he needed to be. It wasn’t as though she were actually in front of me, speaking to me. I forced the feeling of laughter in my mind.

_I couldn’t remember. Just thought I’d check. Alex was kind enough to let me in._

After a long beat, wherein I tried to keep from hearing my own pulse pound in my ears, she added, _Good luck with your billfold. Though it’s probably stolen by now._

I walked farther, faster, with a mind as blank as I could make it. _Yes, probably. You know me. Ever the optimist._

I was tense and only thinking about the next breath to come out of my lungs for the next however many blocks I could no longer keep track. The trajectory of her ability wasn’t nearly that far, not with so many people. Unless she really wanted to try, I supposed. But I was too nervous to risk it. Finally taking a deep breath, I had to hail another cab. It was sinking steadily into late afternoon.

I only needed to drive by Erik’s apartment to know that he wasn’t there, and therefore had to turn around and try my apartment. After that, if he wasn’t there, I tried to imagine what I could do, but a wet, thick dread filled my chest.

Something riotous lurked in the back of my mind. It reminded me of what lurked in Moira’s mind whenever she thought of mine and Erik’s ill-conceived relationship. I wanted to know the same as her.

What would I really do for Erik? How far would I go?

If he were arrested, what would I do to get him back?

I could feel something steely and violent hiding inside me and I knew the answer wouldn’t be palatable.

Once the taxi moved within a block or so of my apartment building, I could feel Erik’s and Raven’s minds shining out above the hundreds of others.

I breathed a terrible sigh of relief. Terrible because I wasn’t yet done. I still didn’t know how I was going to get Erik out of the City. Or if my suggestion in Shaw’s mind would hold. Or what might happen if I did escape with Erik, and the rest of Shaw’s henchmen realized that Erik was conspicuously missing the night his businesses were raided and seized by the Federal government.

It would all just have to be dealt with later. I was certain that would be easier to resolve than trying to get Erik out of prison.

Upstairs, the usual crew was gathered around the dining table, having a late lunch and debating what they wanted to include in that awareness magazine for mutants they wanted to create. Everyone acknowledged my arrival and went back to arguing and eating, except for Erik whose eyes lingered as they usually lingered until he noticed something wrong.

I beckoned him to follow me back to my room. I needed to make quick work of getting Erik the hell out of Dodge. Of course when he was standing in front of me everything went out of my head.

“Charles, what’s wrong?”

My mouth was dry. I felt strained down to my bones, as though I was being stretched at all limbs. I couldn’t say anything because all I wanted to say was the truth. I wanted to confess my whole history. I wanted to explain exactly why Erik couldn’t go to the club this evening, why we needed to be very far away.

Except that would rip Erik away from me in an entirely different way. An idea that filled me equally full of fright as the other.

Without really thinking, only feeling the weight of panic, I leapt forward and seized him by the shoulders, pulling him down for a kiss. I wanted his arms around me and they slid around me, gripping me tight. I couldn’t tell if I was controlling him or if it was what Erik did every time we kissed, and it terrified me. I broke apart from the kiss, hiding my face in the curve of his shoulder, embracing him tightly to keep him floating away.

“What’s wrong, little owl?”

My scalp tingled from his fingers brushing through my hair. His voice had softened tenderly and I could feel his concern calling to me. The dissonance between how he actually felt, the goodness I knew him to possess, and the cruel, destructive thing he thought himself to be only firmed my resolve.

I pulled away, swallowing tightly, and putting on a happy face. I straightened his suspenders, his collar, and tie.

“Go get your jacket. I want to go for a joyride. In fact, we’ll pack a bag. You’ve shirts here. We’ll take those and put them in my travel bag. We’ll go upstate.”

“What? Where upstate?”

“It doesn’t matter. Anywhere. It’ll be fun to get away.”

“Get away from what? You don’t have a job. Not really. And I can’t just leave. I’m not exactly allowed a vacation. What’s gotten into you?”

“We’ll go to a Bed and Breakfast. We’ll get a honeymoon suite. It’ll be a lark.”

Erik grabbed my arm and gave it a reassuring squeeze, bringing my attention back to him. He tried to grin but mostly failed. “What’s eating you, huh? You’re acting silly.”

Again I had to bite down the truth and swallow it like bile. I couldn’t tell him I was worried something might happen, because I was hardly intuitive and something bad was about to happen. It would only cast suspicion on me.

My curtains were still mostly drawn, making the light from the window shine like a beacon, but turned the room only a light gray. It was a dark room. I needed the curtains black and heavy to keep out both light and sound. I was terribly light touch when it came to sleep. But it made the room rather romantic and quiet. Even in the relative dark, I could see the worried expression on Erik’s face, with his eyes big and looking rather young.

I didn’t plan for what words came out of my mouth next, but they were true, if not the truth I wanted to tell.

“It’s only that I want to get away. I want to get out of the City. I hate it. I hate knowing you’re in danger all the time. I’m tired of the all the thoughts pressing into me all the time. I hate having to lie. There are so many people and none of them know. None of them know anything about you or me. They just buzz around me like flies and I’m tired of it. I want to get away with only you. I’m just so bloody tired of pretending!”

I had become short of breath without noticing. I’d reached for something, anything, and was overwhelmed by what I uncovered. I’d been trying to make the best out of everything for so long I’d forgot it could leave an ache, smiling for too long.

Erik was still worried, but suddenly elated in a small part of him, like I’d finally locked onto something in him. He thought I was starting to come around to his way of thinking.

I should have felt bad for encroaching on his mind without reservation, but I needed him. I’d grown to need him as though he were a part of me. A piece of shrapnel my body had healed around and couldn’t be moved.

He slid his hand over my shoulder, rubbing little circles with his palm.

“I wish we could be accepted in the world too, but we can’t simply walk outside and tell everyone what we are. You were right about that. We need to be united first, or we won’t stand a chance against the humans. But we can’t just escape.”

“Why can’t we?” An idea struck me suddenly and I tightened a grip around his waist. “My family has a summer house in Sag Harbor. It’s secluded near the beach, a little walk from the village. No one has been there for years. It’s perfect.”

Erik nodded. “Maybe we can spend some time there for the summer.”

“No,” I almost shouted. “I don’t mean for a vacation, Erik. Let’s live there. We can be alone and no one will bother us. You won’t have to risk your life being a hired thug anymore.”

Erik shook his head. “I don’t have the choice to up and quit. You know that.”

“You’ve wanted to leave that life for so long, Erik. Let’s just go. I’m tired of everything. We can start over. We can start that magazine you want. No one has to know who you are. We’ll reach other mutants. We really will, but it will never work here where you’re a wanted criminal.”

He frowned at me. “It’s not as though they can ever arrest me so long as their guns and handcuffs are metal.”

I sighed, not wanting to get too deeply into the area of his potential arrest. “You don’t know that. You can’t escape every time and I’m the one left worrying about you.”

“As much as I like the idea of retreating to a little love nest with you, hiding away on Long Island isn’t something we can do forever. And how many mutants are we likely to find there as opposed to the biggest City in the world?”

The urge to simply _tell_ him what to do rose with sickening ease. I needed him to go away with me, for his own benefit, yet I wouldn’t resort to that. Not with Erik. But his reluctance felt smothering. Hiding him within the City limits, without his knowledge, without him trying to figure out what happened with the Bureau’s raid, would be nearly impossible.

I pressed my forehead against his shoulder. “We don’t need to be gone forever. We can come back when we’re ready to start communicating with other mutants. I want you safe. I want you.”

His hands traveled down my spine comfortingly. “I know.”

“Please, Erik. If there’s…” I heard my voice crack. I didn’t want to cry, but the prospect of having Erik taken from me was drawing closer. Without intending to, I’d confessed to a fair few things that genuinely plagued me. I felt broken open.

I slid my hand to the joining of his neck and shoulder, to feel the strong muscles and tendons there. I could feel his pulse just under my hand. It wasn’t so long before that I didn’t have any right to touch him. Now that I could, now that he was mine, I was determined not to let him be taken from me.

“If there’s only just a short time that we can be truly together and alone, married to each other in spirit, let’s do it. Let’s go now and live as though we could be together forever because we might not be. I realized that today and I don’t want to live without having been alone with you. However long, I don’t care, but please, Erik.”

I could feel that he had apprehensions, but he didn’t voice them. He held my face with a wide, warm palm and nodded. “Alright. We’ll go.”

I flung my arms around him and kissed him harder than I ever had. Rather than him, it left me feeling dizzy and drunk.

The rest of the night was a mad dash to keep my composure. Without explaining why, trying to palm off the abruptness as one of my whims of no real import to Raven, Erik and I announced we were running up to our summerhouse. We didn’t say the stay was thus far indefinite. It was too difficult to explain. For me, it was about escaping the law. For Erik, it was about appeasing me, surely, but escaping from Shaw.

We made no plans about how to handle the inevitable aftermath and, beneath the worry, it rather excited me. I felt able to handle whatever unorthodox routes trouble came from Shaw or Erik’s past. It was trying to stop the Bureau that left me queasy, but as long as Erik was with me, away from everyone, there would be no arrest. From there, I could handle anything.

Despite my uneasiness, we had to go to Erik’s apartment to pack a suitcase, as the length of our absence was undetermined. I spent the whole time taut and searching for minds, particularly the dangerous flash of Azazel. Thankfully, we made it out without interference.

Borrowing Armando’s car, which rankled Erik more than a little, we left the City. There were so many loose strings of my hastily contrived plan, but I was both exhausted and relieved. Erik drove most of the way to the cottage and I fell asleep on his shoulder.

Erik only asked once what had brought my sudden desire to escape, and to become “married.”

After quiet consideration, I said, “Many things and nothing in particular, I suppose.” For the first time in a long time I wondered about my lies, and whether they were transparent. I tapped the side of my own head. “It’s chaos in here. Something made me realize how close we all are to losing everything important.”

At least that part was the truth.

Erik didn’t say anything in response, and for once I didn’t delve where I oughtn’t.

When we arrived at the cottage it was already late. We only spent a moment on the beach because it was cold, but the view was beautiful. The lake was serene and there was a view of the stars I hadn’t seen in years, having spent too much time in the City. It felt like there were a million stars, a million crickets and frogs, and only we two to enjoy them.

The house had a musty smell. It was only cleaned quarterly when no one visited and no one had in quite some time. All the furniture was still covered in white sheets to protect from dust. We were too tired to clean, so we shucked off the covers and slept in our clothes.

In the morning Erik lingered close, held my hand, pressed his forehead to mine, and confessed, “My name is Max Eisenhardt. I’ve wanted to tell you that since I first met you.”

So I let him hold me close to pretend for a little while we would never leave. I confessed to small, petty things to make up for the greater secrets I held. They didn’t balance any scale, but it felt good to make practice of being honest.

Discord still waited for me, but it was out there. Back in Manhattan and in the future. I knew my lies and missteps would catch up to me, but there, in our secluded little home, for a short while, I had Erik, safe and all to myself.

We no longer had to pretend we didn’t love each other. We had only to pretend that nothing would ever stop us from doing so.

 

_“Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.”_

A Short History of The Years Before

 

There was a story my father told about my birth.

He used to tell people at parties, much to my mother’s chagrin, that he had hired an Irish fortune-teller to wish for good luck upon my still pregnant mother’s stomach and predict my fate. He said he did it on a lark, to cheer up my mother and make her laugh. The fortune-teller said that the baby would be a boy, bright and unusually gifted, which always made people laugh for some reason. I guessed it was the phrase _unusually gifted_ , striking my parents friends as odd choice of words the street performer didn’t understand. Though at some point I began to wonder if she wasn’t more like me. Anyway, the fortune-teller predicted I would be born on the day of the dove, affording me a long and peaceful life. My parents, at the time, had no idea what that meant, as I was expected nowhere near Lent, but assumed that meant a Sunday.

The Tuesday morning I was born a rock dove flew into one of the front window of my parent’s expansive townhouse and fell dead to the street below.

The telling of that story ended with a loud laugh from whatever crowd he was entertaining, but I always wondered if had the window been left open, the fortune-teller’s prediction would have come true. At a young age, I grew a love for science and a determination to prove what was real and unreal. The only problem with that was my very existence proved real what many thought was a fantasy. So in the back of mind, I often wondered about that fortune and that dove, and whether or not it was really a curse, and if it truly meant anything.

While I obviously have no memory of the first few years of my life, I was told I was a capricious and intuitive child, very bright and energetic, like the fortune-teller predicted. I don’t believe I was telepathic in earnest from birth, but neither do I have any recollection of a transformative moment where I knew I had some ability that others did not. It was slow and subtle, reading minds, first by having a notion, then by knowing whole minds entirely.

The first several years of my life before were run almost entirely by a cadre of nannies—almost all seemingly overwhelmed and at odds with what to do with me. When I was four I had my favorite nanny, Nanny Birch. She was a middle-aged Scottish woman with graying brown hair, pale skin, and gray eyes. She wasn’t overly affectionate, but she would let me sit in her lap at night as she read stories to me. Those bedtime stories are my fondest memories of childhood, none of them so miraculous that I could even relay many of the stories she told, but it was time of remarkable calm and happiness for me. Other nannies I had earlier and after exuded a sort of impatience or tiredness or vacancy that no one but me felt. I don’t know why Nanny Birch never felt like that. Taking care of me was a job as tiring for her as it seemed to be for everyone else. She didn’t let me have my way or punish me overmuch, but she was patient and coolheaded.

Nanny Birch was a very clever woman. She taught me how to read and count, and spent a good deal of time teaching me geography. She led my piano lessons during that time—a hobby I’d been bidden to start at the age of three at the behest of my mother. She thought it would be good for me to have a talent to charm people with during social occasions, in case I was blunt and boorish like my father. Luckily, I learned very quickly, some primordial influence of my telepathy, I think.

Nanny Birch also set up the tradition of me performing weekly recitals for the household staff, which is when I think I first became addicted to affection. Whenever I would play, even if my fingers were too slow and ill equipped to play the more dexterous piece of music, the maids and the butler and the kitchen staff would all clap and laugh and coo. Any normal child would sense their approval, but I felt their joy, their amusement, their gaiety.

The first time I played for the staff, I performed _Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star_ and the response was a complete shock to me. Most members of the staff thought _nuisance_ at me in the secret voices I heard, that weren’t actual words but sensations at the same time they were still words. So I had been very nervous when Nanny Birch suggested the idea. After I played, the eruption of happiness washed over me like nothing I’d felt before.

It was the single most common lesson I would learn over and over again in my life. That if I were charming and pleasant, other people would feel happy. When other people were happy, it made me feel good.

To me, doing good and having good return back wasn’t some abstract concept. It was a physical reality.

 

 

So I started to play piano for people as much as possible. Not only that, but any performance that adults seemed to find amusing. That tended to involve acting like a grown up. Of course I wasn’t a perfect mimic, but I would sit down for tea like a grown up, study assiduously, telling people it was my work and that I was very busy, and make sure to avoid conflict because that is what a gentleman did.

I would often try to get my mother to come to my recitals, but was less than successful in that regard. My mother could play and sing beautifully. I heard her some nights after I was supposed to be asleep. It was activity we shared, but not often together. The times she did stop in during one my lessons or recitals, she would dampen the sensations around me with a peculiar distance. It felt like being left out in the snow.

It was for that reason I developed a waxing and waning obsession with hearing my mother’s secret voice.

When I was five, Nanny Birch left my family’s employ due to a disagreement over pay. The anticlimactic, simple normality of her departure felt like an insult to my strangeness. She didn’t make much of a fuss over leaving, but she did let me have a few of the storybooks she had read to me. I cried for days and would hold them at night to go to sleep. The next nanny that was hired stayed for a month before she quit. She said I was uncontrollable and far too emotional to be healthy. I think for a year or more after Nanny Birch, I was out of control. Any one near me in the slightest foul mood would amplify mine exponentially.

In that regard, I grew rather close to my mother. I was ever chasing after her approval. It wasn’t something I was ever bathed in, but neither did she have strong feelings of disapproval or anger. It was perplexing. A puzzle I continually wanted to pick at, even before I could understand the reasons why.

Oddly enough, going to primary school was the thing that calmed me down most after that. At first the crush of dozens of young minds was tiring and wore my nerves thin. But more often than not, the other children weren’t so tempestuous as the fewer number of adults I was exposed before. Their minds were easier to comprehend and they were made happier more easily. Likely it was the matter of being forced to adapt to new minds.

I never felt like one of them, but I was more content to simply be around people.

The first time I knew my differences were more extensive than simple differences was my first introduction to the other side of my telepathy—the controlling and persuasion of thoughts. Prior to that, the hearing of secret voices was a thing I knew intrinsically to be unusual, but something I assumed to be like good eyesight or a heightened sense of smell.

It was a rare winter evening in my eighth year that was my father was home early from work. When I was presented to my parents for the day, I got to play at his feet in the parlor before dinner. I remember looking into kaleidoscope and pointing at the fire to see the colors more brilliantly. My parents were going out for dinner than evening, so my mother left to dress. She came back more abruptly than she should have and seething with anger, more close to her than any emotion I’d ever felt. Her maid was trailing behind her nervously.

Before a word was spoken I saw an image of jewelry. A brooch made from blue and green opal with golden water lilies carved over it. Seconds later my mother said it had been stolen.

Even at eight I knew that was a horrible thing for the staff. Someone was going to be sacked and it filled me with dread. With only the desire to know what happened, it was like an electric switch came on in my body. Then I heard in a panicked hush an overlaid rush of sound and color and feeling. It seemed to come from all around me without source. But I knew it was coming from the maid.

It felt like pushing, or moving through custard, and, suddenly— I knew her instantly.

She did not steal it. _She didn’t steal it._ She was just borrowing it. She was going to bring it back, honest. She would never steal, never, ever. Mum walloped her good when she was a girl for stealing that licorice—She would _never ever_ steal the Missus’ brooch. It was just such a pretty thing and she wanted to wear something that would make her look pretty and posh for Ethan. She was going to put it right back. The Missus wouldn’t have even noticed—she tried to recommend a different piece—

That’s when my mother slapped the girl and she shouted in surprise, and I looked around like I was using my eyes for the first time.

Those words of hers hadn’t only been in her head and mine. She’d confessed out loud to my parents.

She looked stunned and more from just the slap. She was shaking her head. Clearly she hadn’t intended to say those words at all.

I didn’t understand what had happened to me, but I felt guilty. I could only look at her and see something like a glass bowl I had dropped. I had done something to her, but I didn’t understand what. The girl was so nervous and afraid, already worrying about how she would get another job. I knew that plain as day, but she wasn’t saying it. I could feel it as though it were my own thought.

Every other secret voice I’d heard then shifted in my mind somehow. Every time it was a feeling directed at me I suddenly knew it was a feeling I’d taken from someone.

I looked at my mother and father, who both seemed angry, but oblivious to what was going on with me.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” the girl cried. “I meant nothing by it, I swear.”

Without realizing it, I was crying too. I yelled, “Please, don’t sack her! I promise she didn’t want to steal it. I promise!”

My mother looked at me sharply, “What do you know about it?”

I knew the girl was telling the truth about it. It was like knowing when the sun was out. There was no room for doubt, but I couldn’t explain that. Nor could I explain somehow knowing I’d made her speak.

Everyone was looking at me. I knew that if I didn’t say anything the girl would be fired. It was the foremost thing in my mother’s thoughts and my father would support her. I knew that if I tried to explain that I saw into other people, something bad would happen. I wanted so badly to go back and just erase the last few minutes. I wanted that so much my body shook. I wanted everything to stop.

Then I waited for someone to say something. I waited for someone to move.

But nothing was happening. My mother and father were stood so still I could hear them breathing. The girl was frozen with a look of fear on her face. It was like they were waiting for permission to continue living. And like before; somehow I knew I had done this. I felt the same guilty feeling.

I looked around nervously, seeing the clock tick and a bird fly past the window and the fire crackle. Doing the only thing I could think of, I closed my eyes and wished hard that they would forget about the brooch.

When I opened my eyes again, everyone was moving, looking around the room confusedly.

My father looked at my mother and said tentatively, “Did you… did you need anything, dear?”

My mother shook her head as though she wasn’t sure of her own answer. After a moment she walked back down the hallway silently, with the maid following behind. I felt like I held my breath for minutes afterward, but no one approached me or asked me any questions. No one said anything about brooch or any missing jewelry. And the next day the maid was back, making my mother’s room and cleaning the curtains.

Everything went back to normal, except for me.

From then on I knew I could do things no one else but magicians and witches in stories could do.

I spent the next several years at school, alternately wanting to separate from my strange abilities and explore them further, testing what I could do. Sometimes I would wonder if I was making up stories for myself. I would have to remind myself of the reality by looking into people again. And the more I did it, the easier it became.

The biggest test of my ability to change the way people thought was when Raven came along.

When I was eleven, we moved to America. My father was appointed to the head of a New York branch of the Xavier Trust, and we took residence in a huge mansion in Westchester County, New York. Everything was so much bigger in America. Not just our house, but also the acres of land that stretched around it. The disorienting buzz of people was more painful and intoxicating in New York City than it was in London. There were millions of people piled on top of each other in the City. Even as a child I was amazed and confounded by the extremities. The biggest slum in the world was the Five Points with streets full of horse carts and vendors shouting in a dozen different languages, but not more than a few miles from Wall Street, where people like my mother and father walked down the sidewalks safe from the carriages and the motor cars.

I was immediately installed in a boarding school in Massachusetts called St. Peter’s School for Boys. There I continued the pattern I’d established with other children. I was popular and well liked; due in part to the fact I was charming, smart, and could easily deflect conflicts, but also because of my parent’s station. Those were the same reasons, however, that prevented me from making close friends. Even acknowledging that I wanted closer connections to other people distanced me further. I knew other eleven-year-old boys didn’t make friends because they desired to do so. It was something that came naturally to normal children.

I didn’t expect to find my first real friend in a lost six-year-old girl, attempting to impersonate my mother while stealing food when I had come home for the summer.

I had read enough stories, and read enough minds, not to be completely overwhelmed by the extraordinary. While I had thought it unlikely I was the only unusual person in the world, I was overcome with joy when I met Raven. She was magnificent, able to turn into any person she saw. But it was more than that. I knew for the first time that I wasn’t alone in the world. It was perhaps also the first time I had felt such happiness generated from completely within myself.

The very first moment I saw Raven posing as my mother I knew something was wrong. Raven had replicated her exactly, but there was no way she could’ve known, not only that I could read minds, but a hungry and scared child’s thoughts were much warmer and present than my mother’s.

When I spoke to her with my telepathy in the kitchen that night, making my voice big and source-less, because I didn’t know exactly who she was, she became frightened and shrunk down to a small child-like figure in blue with fiery red hair.

Without helping it, I smiled and said, thinking of Nanny Birch’s stories, “You look like a pixie.” Of course, she was larger than I imagined pixies and fairies to be, and lacked little gossamer wings, but it was the nearest thing I could think on.

She looked at me with wide eyes. “You’re not afraid of me?”

Her mind was sweet and bold, if a little battered. Some people had a hue to their minds that I could see as instantly dangerous. Some people had the potential for danger lying beneath certain actions, like my Father, who had a niggling curious tension in his mind that got him to pulling me by the ear when I was annoying and shutting me in my room during dinner when I misbehaved. His work at the bank kept him away often. As with the decorum for someone of my ilk, children weren’t to pester their fathers, so I never spent a good deal of time with him. My mother’s mind, on the other hand, never felt particularly dangerous, just absent. As though she wished she were somewhere else.

The little girl with blue skin felt like the laughing, out-of-water splash of a jumping fish. I saw nothing to be afraid of in her. But she was so dearly afraid. She was hungry and tired and there was a red flash of a big hand squeezing her arm so tightly and twisting; the stinging shout of “she’s got the devil in her” and so much sobbing.

I immediately wanted to take her in my arms and pet her.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” I said, firmly attached already to convincing her I would take care of her, and therefore needing to prove my worth. It wasn’t a declaration I believed at the time, but one I would try dearly to evince later. “And you won’t be either. I’ll keep you safe.”

She didn’t edge closer to the door like she wanted to, but she didn’t come nearer either. “You’re not going to send me to the orphanage?”

There was a flurry of rage and fear in her mind. Her parents screaming, drowning her in a tub of special water with a man holding a cross above her, and then leaving her with nuns poking at her disfigurements, never to come back.

“You’re not disfigured,” I said, more sharply than I thought I could.

She looked at me skeptically, a funny look on such a small face. “I’m not a pixie. Pixies are only in stories.”

Reaching for something to comfort, but finding words I wound up believing, I said, “Maybe the pixies were made to look like people like you.”

She smiled a little at that. “How did you do that, with your voice?”

“I’m like you! Well, a bit. I can do this.” I put an image of a little yellow dog frolicking in high grass, chasing a butterfly in her head. She laughed and it made me giddy. “You see? We’re different, but we’re not malformed.”

She shook her head a little shyly. “You look normal. You can’t be like me.”

“We can both do things no else can do outside of storybooks. Just because we don’t look the same doesn’t mean we aren’t alike. What’s your name?”

“Raven,” she said tentatively.

“My name is Charles Xavier,” I put out my hand for shaking but she just looked at me confusedly. Biting my lip, I added, “You can stay here if you’d like. You’ll never be hungry or scared again.”

“I can stay? Here?”

I smiled, took the cold chicken she’d set on the counter to eat, and gave it to her. I took her by her other hand and showed her the mansion and all the rooms we could play in. She didn’t say much, but then again I didn’t let her I was talking so much. Eventually I took her to my old nursery, where I kept my books from when I was her age. She fell asleep in the middle of Snow White.

Seeing her there with my old things, with her slumbering mind full of relief and little blue men with big noses that I imagined were Snow White’s dwarves, I felt overtaken with something I’d never felt before. It made my chest feel full and watery. I didn’t know what was happening, only that I was determined to take care of her no matter what.

I slept near her on the floor that night, covering us both head to toe with an old quilt from the trunk in my nursery, so if a maid came in she wouldn’t see us.

The rest of the summer was filled with plan making and subterfuge. It was exciting. It was the first summer I had away from school that felt like it flew by. I was teaching her how to read and how to pretend to be the kind of girl who would’ve been my sister, which meant teaching her how to sit and curtsey. It was also the first time I truly flexed and measured the extent of my ability. Changing everyone’s minds was the only thing I could think of to keep Raven safe and with me. I could never convince my parents they’d had a second child. That would need too many lies to account for and I knew already that an effective persuasion was either indecently thorough or a very simple veer off the traditional path.

Keeping Raven became a matter of convincing my parents they were taking in a ward who would be like a daughter to them. Every day that summer I got better at making sure their minds would not reset to see the huge gap that came before the unknown little girl. Every morning I would tell my parents and the staff that this was the girl they had taken in. I would have to develop more of the story to make it legitimate. I told them Raven was a child of one of the maids who had died. Then I told them she had nowhere else to go because she was illegitimate, so they had to take her in. I told them they felt guilt for the death of the maid, because cleaning made her cough worse, that they were being charitable and responsible and all their friends thought well of them for it.

By the end of the summer, the whole staff, and the village, and my parents had welcomed Raven. Well, as welcomed as my parents ever made anyone feel. She was enrolled in the girls’ school, St. Mary’s, connected with St. Peter’s at my silent behest.

For years, Raven and I were each other’s world.

We would sneak out of our separate dormitories to spend time together every day. With my ability, it didn’t really matter if we hid somewhere in Raven’s dormitory, or mine, or spent time on the grounds, or scurried off to the village nearby to eat pies and sweets from the local bakery. I became very practiced in the art of shielding Raven and myself to other people’s perception. Not only in that respect, but to help hide Raven’s natural form as well. She got very used to creating the little blonde girl that people saw as my adopted sister.

We became experts in our own abilities, still unsure if we were the only ones of our breed. I was sure there had to be more people like us, that our abilities couldn’t be pointless, singular phenomena. Regardless of the potential for more people like us, Raven and I were thrown together out of camaraderie in our innate strangeness.

It was the irony of our existence: we were both rather well liked for our sociable personalities, which were largely fabricated to hide how unusual we were.

Shortly after I was accepted into university my father died of a heart attack.

It was a strange funeral. We none of us had an overabundance of family, so it was attended mainly by my father’s dour bank colleagues in strained, old fashioned waistcoats and bowler hats. None of us were very emotional over his passing. Raven, as a rule, was not very close with either Sharon or Brian. And my mother observed the funeral with the same polite detachment she did everything.

As for me, after my first few years, and certainly not after Raven, I never made much of an effort to ingratiate myself to my father. He had tried for a time to insist I was going to be part of the banking business, but that didn’t last.

The main reason it was a momentous occasion in my life was because the night before I went back to school, my mother came into my room to speak to me.

She had a drink in her hand, but that wasn’t unusual. She did however open the conversation by saying, “You’re a good son. Do you know that Charles?”

I was understandably stunned. My mother had never said such a thing. After a long moment, I said, “Thank you.”

She nodded noncommittally. “It’s just unfortunate you didn’t have better parents.”

I had long agreed with that sentiment, but I didn’t say anything.

“If you don’t mind me asking, why are you saying this?”

“Your father’s dead,” she said. “I think you’ve known for some time your father and I were never meant to be parents. You know it’s not that I never cared for you. I do. It’s only that…”

“You had different plans for life?” I supplied.

She didn’t smile, but she nodded, looking somewhat wistfully.

“I suppose you can do what you like now. Is that why you’re saying this?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps I’ll go back to England. You’re taking care of Raven, after all.”

I nodded. She was about to walk away before I stopped her for one last question, so long as she was feeling honest.

“Why did you stay, then? All this while. You could have left years ago if you didn’t want to be a wife and mother.”

She frowned as though I were speaking another language. “Don’t be absurd, Charles,” she said. Though, again she stopped, and said, “One day you’ll find that it isn’t you who makes plans, my dear.”

It was a rather odd parting statement. One I more or less dismissed.

Then I went back to school.

I lived as quietly amongst humans as a mutant could and made it my goal in life to find some way to help other mutants, make them aware that they weren’t alone. I left school. Raven and I returned to New York to be the wealthy, wastrel children of the modern decade we were destined to be. I landed up working for the Bureau of Investigation.

At the time it was all very exciting and groundbreaking. I thought I was on the edge of world. I thought I’d been in love. I thought I knew a great many things.

It wasn’t until I met Erik that my definition for all those things changed. And it wasn’t until I met Erik that I understood why my mother had said the things she said.

It wasn’t until after Erik that I realized I had no plans at all.

 

_“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”_

The End of Summer, 1929

 

“You two look ridiculous,” Erik said smugly, hiding under the umbrella and looking over the top of his book.

Really, it was something to hear coming from a man who had started maintaining a silly thicket of hair above his lip and calling it a moustache. I was not a fan of the new moustache. It was too big. He thought it was dashing and respectable, so I tried not to complain.

“Says the man reading a book in swimming shorts,” I said through chattering teeth.

Raven and I scrambled for the towels and quickly wrapped them around our shoulders. The weather had been quite nice for weeks, but that really hadn’t warmed the lake well enough for swimming. Still, I couldn’t resist. When Raven came to visit, I urged her to pack our swimsuits and fetch one for Erik.

Erik did not know how to swim. He’d never had the opportunity to go as a child. I had lured him down to the shoreline, in order to teach him, only long enough for him to walk ankle deep into the lake before he scoffed at the temperature and went back the rocky cove where we set our umbrella and beach chairs. He stayed there and watched while Raven and I took a crazed run into the cold lake water. We dared each other to swim as far as we could, but I only lasted fifteen minutes before I felt my arms starting to go weak.

We came rushing back, shivering and clutching each other. I supposed we were a rather ridiculous sight given that our swimming clothes were basically identical, both red with white piping lining the shoulders and thighs. We’d gone swimming on crowded beaches before, but something about our intimate crew made me realize how revealing both our suits were. They barely covered any of our thighs. Seeing Erik’s gaze dart from me to my sister made me uncomfortable.

I collided against Erik’s side to steal his attention.

He put his arm around me and scrubbed my head with my towel. “You’re freezing. I told you the water was too cold. You’re going to get pneumonia.”

I threw my arm around him, sliding into the small gap in the side of his beach chair, and tucked my cold fingers under his armpit, causing his long form to wriggle. He grabbed me more tightly. “Thankfully, I have a big, strong fella to care for me in my dying hours.”

“Strong and resourceful,” Erik corrected. “And prudent enough to stay out of the frigid water. And intelligent.”

“And modest,” Raven said from under the towel draped over her head. I couldn’t see her rolling her eyes, but I was sure she was.

“Modesty is for the weak,” Erik said, only half joking.

I laughed. “He’s also looking rather tasty in his new swimsuit.”

Raven had picked out a rather nice one for Erik. It was two pieces with a tight white top, meant to be short-sleeved but barely covering his rather wide shoulders. The bottom half was a pair of black briefs that cinched below his waist with a belt. Theoretically, with the freedom of a two-piece, Erik could take the shirt half off, but hadn’t. The fact that she could pick the suit to flatter him best was not surprising. She’d always had an eye for his form. He was all long, wiry limbs in that suit, something both robust and fragile about him with that that skin bared.

Erik made a low noise that sounded his appreciation of my comment. He worked his arm behind my head and leaned into me for a kiss. I squeezed him as much as I could my prone position and kissed him back with gusto.

Raven made a disgusted sound. “I don’t need to watch you two spoon. I’m going back to the house.” She whipped the towel around her and blurred into her typical pink skin and blonde hair.

“You don’t need to leave,” I said out of politeness, but willing to let off the petting.

“You could learn something,” Erik said with a mischievous grin.

Raven was already walking away and shouted back to us, “So’s your Aunt Fanny!”

Erik chuckled into my hair. “She’s a bearcat,” he muttered appreciatively.

I knew I shouldn’t have felt jealous, but I couldn’t stop a well of discomfort bubbling up in my belly. Erik claimed to be exclusively homosexual, but I wasn’t so sure that possible. When I’d come back from my hiding out Erik and I joined together with ferocity. Yet I’d been gone so long and he and Raven had become so close in my absence. They now had jokes they passed quietly between each other, and an inclination to lean against each other when they were talking.

Since our retreat to the beach house, Raven had been making frequent trips in for them to organize for a group they wanted to create to reach out to other mutants in the City. She was giving him the attention he wanted. Whether he was attracted to her or not, it was bound to win him over.

“Yes, she is,” I muttered, drumming my fingers over Erik’s chest.

“She’ll be good with the other mutants, once we find them. She’s agreeable enough when she talks to other people who know what it’s like to hide.”

I nodded noncommittally, pressing my ear against his skin to hear his heartbeat. Steady as usual. Not much keyed him up.

“We’ve got material ready for printing. Hank’s come up with a solution for his radio machine to find more mutants. When do you think we should head back to New York?”

My stomach clenched up a little at the mention. Erik was bringing it up more and more.

So far as anyone in the Bureau was willing to admit, which checked in properly with what they had in their heads, thirteen known hoods were arrested the day of their big raid, not counting the various patrons who were taken in that night. It was a huge capture. Ten of them were under Shaw’s employ and the others were from other neighborhoods who happened to have been at Shaw’s clubs. Shaw, himself, and Emma were not captured and their whereabouts subsequently unknown. Shaw’s properties and known assets had been seized, and there was a warrant out for his arrest.

It had been quite the success, and quite the tense meeting with Moira and Davidson after the trap I’d set in Moira’s mind had been sprung.

I’d contacted them, foolishly in all likelihood. But I’d needed to know the details of the raid.

I wasn’t officially decommissioned as a mutant contact for the Bureau of Investigation, but neither was I put on any tasks for my misuse of a Bureau official. It was a sort of forgiveness, as they didn’t really understand the extent of my ability. It had frightened them. I gleaned from their minds that the possibility of arrest had been bandied about. It was Moira who had dissuaded them, arguing that the arrests they had made were ensured only by the knowledge I secured for them. Moira was also kind enough to keep my real purpose, tipping off a criminal to ensure his escape, to herself.

She had yet to forgive me for using her as I did, of course. I didn’t blame her.

There was the knowledge we were all stepping around but refusing to admit: If they wanted to arrest me, they now knew they couldn’t. I’d tried to keep the extent to which I could alter minds, even minimally, a secret, but the cat was out of the bag. Any Bureau official who might try to subdue me wouldn’t even remember it come morning.

They knew Erik was in hiding somewhere, but he was low priority for the Bureau. There were more dangers now with Shaw and Emma on the lam and very likely angry and aware that somehow Erik had disappeared on the very night of a biggest raid on their facilities. I sincerely doubted my littler interference in Shaw’s mind had stuck. And even if it had, Emma undoubtedly undid it.

The idea of going back into the City, where all of that lived and lurked in the corners of my life, was extremely unpalatable.

Yet beginning this work with organizing mutants was one way for Erik to truly leave his old life.

“We should stay a while more. It’s so lovely. And the fireworks over the lake on the Fourth of July are wonderful.”

Erik sighed, his hand stroking my shoulder pausing for a moment. “Don’t you think there are people waiting to here that they’re not isolated?”

It was an argument that instilled genuine guilt in me. Guilt over leaving people who were unaware just how common mutation might be, or that there was nothing wrong with them for being different. More guilt over my lies to Erik, my constant need for fabrication in order to keep him safe.

“Hank isn’t even done with his machine yet,” I pointed out, surprised by how natural prevarication came to me now. Or maybe it had always been that way and I simply hadn’t paid attention. “Without this machine, if it even works, we’d have to find them by walking me up every street in the City and see which gave out first: my legs or my brain.”

I felt Erik’s chin nod on the top of my head. “You’re right. There’s no point in leaving until we’ve worked that out, at least.”

My shoulders and back loosened from a tension I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. It was like that all the time now. Erik would pick up a thread that threatened to rip loose all the seams I’d put together and I’d feel sick with worry. At night sometimes I would lay awake while Erik slept, feeling the inimical weight of my sins press on me. My hands would shake with the dread they caused me. All I wanted to do in the world was wake him and confess. But the possibilities resulting from confession made me just as heartsick. Erik feeling betrayed. Erik condemning my lies for insulting our relationship. Erik leaving me.

My options were a life bereft of Erik or a life full of lies.

All in all it was an easy decision, despite my guilt. Because I could hold him in my arms, feel the passion of his heart, and soothe my sins by his affection.

There were moments when it was particularly difficult to keep up my charade.

Like when in June, Erik led me out to the patio at the end of a day he’d been particularly solemn and quiet. He took my hand feeling nervous and slightly clammy. On the ground there were two wine glasses laid on their sides on a cloth. There were a few candles on the table we often had lunch at when we wanted to dine outdoors.

He looked down. “I know when you said we should be married, you didn’t mean actually married. As married as we are able to be. I’ve just been thinking of it for these past months,” Erik paused. “I made these.”

He fished two rings out of his pocket and held them out to me on his palm. They were simple bands colored bronze, but there were Hebrew letters etched on the inside. He didn’t have to speak, or even think them, for me to know what they meant. _I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine_. I was sure of it.

He gestured to the glasses with his free hand. “This isn’t how it goes. I don’t know the words. I’m only clutching at half remembered lessons, but I… The intent is good. I know it isn’t real, but I think it’s enough.”

Since our getaway, we’d been calling each other _husband_ with a little wink and a nod, trying to ignore that in reality it was what we both wanted. Obviously most heterosexuals thought the idea of queers marrying each other to be something of a laugh, and even some queers thought the same way. I had grown up reading the romantic odes the Greeks and Victorians wrote each other, knowing that some pairs of men found ways to live together. It wasn’t the same thing a legal marriage was, but it was just as good in my estimation.

I shook my head. “It is real. This is very real, Erik.” I took one of the rings from Erik’s palm, trying to keep the tremor out of my hand. And I put the ring on his finger. “This is less than we deserve, but more than I could have ever hoped for. It’s for us and that makes me happier than I can say.”

Erik put the other ring on my finger and kissed me. We stepped on the glasses a little unsurely, while laughing. Then I put my arms around Erik and let the words he was saying drift through my mind. We lied out on the hammock in the yard, watching the stars until sleep.

It was the most perfect night of my life.

Eventually in August, as I dreaded, Hank finished building his radio device to find other mutants.

The night before we turned back for the City we had a huge row. He said I was hypocritical and shallow. He accused me of being obstinate and uninterested in the cause, which was true. I wanted to stay in my little cocoon with Erik, where we would be married forever, where we were detached from the town and unknown.

Of course Erik was so confused as to why I didn’t want to join his efforts gleefully. Why, if we agreed about helping other mutants, I couldn’t bring myself to actually do anything about it.

I took a walk along the lake that night to calm down. A thing Erik hated.

“Get angry! If you’re angry, be angry! Maybe it will motivate you to do something, goddamn it.”

I bit my tongue. All the responses I wanted to lay on him. I wanted him to know I was doing this for his own good. I wanted him to know I was torturing myself in this silence, to keep him safe. And he wanted to throw that all away by walking right into the place where he’d best get arrested or killed.

But I tightened my fist and walked the beach to remain far away from him.

I feared confessing. I feared clearing his memory of all his past, of all the instances I might have lied. I feared clearing him like a slate and starting over with a facsimile that wore his face. It made my stomach ache with nausea as I walked over the cold sand to know how easy it would be and how much I wanted to make him do my bidding.

When I returned to the house, the last time I would ever return to our gentle little home, Erik was waiting for me in the sitting room reading a book, still stuck on the same page he’d been at earlier that morning. He caught my eye as I walked in, darkened, and looked back to the book.

“You were gone long,” he said curtly.

I supposed the fact that he bothered to wait up for me, even though he was pretending not to, was a good sign.

When I didn’t respond he threw his book down. “I’m going to bed. I’ll leave you to your petulance.”

“I know you think there’s something wrong with me for not leaping to my feet to show other mutants the path, but you’re incapable of considering you might be wrong about this. Mutant or not, most people don’t want to be found and told their different. They already know. Most people just want to be left alone.”

He turned in his tracks and glared at me.

I hadn’t planned to say that, but it wasn’t something I disagreed with.

Before he could speak, I added, “But that’s not even what gives me hesitation.”

“Then what is it?”

“You don’t understand. Your passion is what makes you admirable. It isn’t like that for me. Whatever admiration might be found in my behavior is in my restraint.”

“What are you—“

“I can control people’s minds, Erik. I can read minds. When humans realize there are people who can do things like that, they’re going to be frightened. As they should be.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this. So you don’t want to help other mutants come into their abilities. You’ve been lying to me all this time.”

My chest seized at the accusation. I forced myself to remember he didn’t know what I was really lying about.

“That’s not what I said. I do. I’m simply trying to tell you that it has to be done carefully. I don’t want to do this at the expense of your safety. Or mine. Or anyone else’s.”

“Any danger we pose is in the minds of humans. They hate their own kind, so undoubtedly they will hate us. But there was always going to be risk involved. I don’t see what particular danger I might face, but—“

“You are a known criminal! Do you honestly think you can escape arrest forever? Do you honestly think that Shaw won’t be looking for you in the City?”

Erik seemed surprised. “You’ve never… We’ve been gone for months. Shaw’s gone. All his assets are gone. He wouldn’t come back where he’s being hunted down.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, now’s a bit late for you to be concerned about me living beyond the law.”

“Any reason you might be taken away from me is one I’m going to worry about.”

Erik sighed, his stance finally relenting. “I promise to be careful.”

“Promise me you’ll use another name,” I said suddenly. “We can create another identity for you. You can go back to being Max Eisenhardt. The authorities don’t know that name.”

“I was a hood then too.”

“But you weren’t a known murderer then.”

Erik scowled. “They don’t know that now. As far as the coppers know I’m Shaw’s bagman and a bodyguard. They can’t prove anything else.”

I knew otherwise, however.

“Just promise me. Please, Erik.”

He nodded. “If it will help you, yes. I won’t be Erik Lehnsherr anymore.”

When we arrived in back in New York the next day we silently returned our things to our separate apartments. At the end of the day, before I was about to go to a place that no longer felt like a home, Erik took my hand. He absent-mindedly grazed the ring I wore with his fingertips.

“This doesn’t change anything. We’re still married. We’ll be able to live together again one day.”

I nodded. “Of course.” But I didn’t really believe him.

Erik smiled tightly. I didn’t really think that he believed himself either. It was more like he was hoping aloud. Something he never would have done before I met him. I couldn’t decide if that was better or worse.

I was tired and I felt defeated, but, after leaving Erik’s apartment building, my feet took me to Hank’s apartment. Then it was as though my brain dawned. I couldn’t believe why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. I ran up to Hank’s room, waking him up, and dragging him to Cerebro.

During our stay in Long Island, Hank had written us many updates about his theories and the progress of his amplification machine that he’d got around to calling _Cerebro_. It was, rather illicitly, installed in the basement of a 50,000-watt radio tower. It was essentially a radio. It had a helmet with transmission pads meant to connect whatever energy my brain used to read other minds and project that over a distance.

The machine whirred to life. I could, even in its preliminary stages feel the radio waves give me access to greater awareness.

Hank flipped switches on the machine hesitantly. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait for Erik and Raven?”

“Yes,” I shouted over the sound. “I just want to try something out first before we start searching for other mutants. It would be good to test first, yes?”

“I guess. This can’t wait until morning?”

“Is everything ready?” I said, ignoring him.

He gave me the all clear with a final adjustment of a dial and suddenly I was everywhere. I was spread out over such a large part of the metropolis. More voices than I’d ever heard at once. Not just the hundreds or thousands of a neighborhood, but so many more than I could possibly count or comprehend. Millions. But I wasn’t looking for a group, a nonspecific clutch of mutants like Erik wanted. I was looking for one person. And I was certain that the radio waves transmitting me would do most of the work for me.

 _Emma_ I called. _Emma Frost._

I felt, reaching with the far-reaching grasp of my mind. I felt airborne. I felt like oxygen. I felt like the electric reach of atoms in the dissemination of light. I searched for the familiar barbed transmission of her mind. The cold peel of her mind registered dully somewhere far off in my periphery. I knew it was her, and I could feel her, but she was still guarded enough that I couldn’t sink into her. There was a bitter part of me, floating on the intoxicant of Cerebro, that wanted to bite into her like fruit flesh.

_I’m sure you’ve been looking for me. You can find me now. We have something to take care of and I can’t wait any longer._

Dimly, I was aware of her receiving my message and confirming. I didn’t have to tell her directly where to find me. It was something she took snaps and snippets of information from me; something I in part gave to her in watery tendrils.

Yet I knew she knew.

When I disengaged from the machine, as Hank shut off the switches that flung my awareness out across the City, my mind pulled back into itself and I felt small again. My knees felt weak.

Hank held me up under my arms. “Are you alright? Did it work? Nothing happened.”

I nodded lazily. “Yes, it worked.”

There was more information humming under Hank’s skin. Curiosity and concern and interest. I didn’t have enough time for that. I told him it was important I had to go, or I impressed upon him with my ability. I didn’t even think of the difference or what I’d done until I was out on the street, hailing a taxicab to the closed down Caspartina.

I felt drunk from the expansion to my power, yet tiny in the sudden reduction of it. The whole of my world had narrowed to the tips of my fingers and the weight of my eyelashes. I felt more powerful than I ever had, and at the same time, with the memory of millions of minds pressing in on me, trying to edge into my consciousness, I was less knowledgeable than I’d ever been. There was so more to do, to know.

But that would have to wait until I met with Emma.

It was hours before I felt Emma’s presence start to make itself known, but I immediately knew something was wrong. She had people with her. She was trying to form a shield from me, but one of them I would know despite any disguise.

She had brought Erik with her.

Part of me wanted to wipe their minds and run away, but it was far too late for that. Besides, the sensation I’d had for nearly a year was finally settling into my chest. It was almost relief. The anticipation was finally over. I was finally about to be exposed. I had only a few minutes to compose myself for what was about to happen.

Emma walked through the door first glittering in her crystal form, with Shaw and Erik trailing behind her shortly. Erik was still wearing the clothes he’d been wearing before, but without a tie and his collar hanging free around his neck. Shaw did not have a gun trained on Erik, which would have been useless, but held his hand on Erik’s shoulder as though it were just as dangerous a thing.

I couldn’t even snatch any glimpse of what any of them were thinking before Emma laid a shield over them. Of course, I saw Erik’s recognition and fear and confusion settle over his face.

“No,” Erik muttered. “No. Let him go. What are you doing with Charles? Let him go.”

Emma whistled. “You sure have got him twirled around your little finger, sugar. You must have been a busy boy. Keeping so many secrets from so many people. I underestimated you.”

I couldn’t read Erik’s mind, but he was clearly confused.

“Just let him go, Emma. He doesn’t need to be here.”

Shaw’s face brightened in a vicious way. “Well, dear Erik had to be here. We had thought he was the one who sold us out to the Bureau.” He finally walked away from Erik and came towards me. “I mean, who woulda thunk it? Our little piano player. I thought having a telepath on my side would have worked out in my favor, but I guess you two sort of cancel each other out, huh?”

“Something like that,” I said, casting an eye toward Erik. He looked stricken, and horrified.

Shaw laughed coldly. He turned slightly and shook his finger at Erik. “What a sap you turned out to be, kid. I thought you were just stealing from me, but no. My racket, my whole industry taken down by two faggots in love. It’s one for the history books.”

“Erik had nothing to do with the Bureau’s raid. I was the only one giving them intelligence.”

I refrained from looking too much at Erik, who wore an infuriated mien that I could feel even without telepathy, as the realization that I’d been lying to him from the start set in.

“Intelligence?” Shaw laughed again, suddenly looming. Quicker than I could move away from, his arm shot out and squeezed around my throat. “You little cocksucker.”

More than the air being closed off to my lungs, I could feel some sort of terrible, cloying warmth pulsing through me. Shaw’s whole arm seemed to be glowing and vibrating at rapidly. Heat spread through my body that instantly evoked ache and char and burning hair. I grabbed onto his forearm as he started to lift me up but my hands wanted to let go. He was like touching a working engine.

I heard Erik yell my name in the distance. I saw the iridescent flutter of Emma’s form turning to flee. Distantly I was a little confused as to why she had even come, why she hadn’t felt the other minds waiting in the back for my call. Maybe she had and was regretting her decision.

I made my signal to Moira and the rest of the team from the Bureau to come be my cavalry.

Even as the oxygen was being cut off from my brain, I could tell Shaw looked surprised. I couldn’t fathom why. Of course I contacted the Bureau after I’d talked to Emma. I thought she would have suspected as much. Maybe she had, and was ridding herself of Shaw.

Contemplating their suspicions had to wait because once the team of feds closed in, Shaw threw me clear across the room. I landed on a table, my head pounding and air rushing into my lungs like a freight train.

A hail of bullet fire poured down from the Bureau agents. I only had a moment to shout _stay down_ into Erik’s mind. But something strange happened. The bullets hit their mark, but not fatally. Somehow Shaw had collected them, gathered the force from them and let the shells hit the ground. In his arms, his arms doubling over and shaking intensely, he held a bright ball of fire. And he threw it back at them.

In moments the whole back end of the bar was ablaze.

There were shouts of pain and panic from the agents. The ones still standing, or scrambling behind overturned tables for cover, were reloading their guns as though it would work better the second time.

Suddenly Erik was crawling over me, trying to pull me up. “Come on, Charles. We have to get out of here.”

“Wait,” I said, trying to get a hold on Shaw’s mind.

“You can’t stop him. Any blow just makes him stronger. He absorbs everything.”

Shaw’s mind was a white-hot cavernous place, like the center of the earth. Even he must have had a weakness, a way to be stopped. I sunk my fingers into him as far as I could, put myself into him to still him, and pulled him to a grinding halt. It was the only thing I could do. The fire, the agents, the guns, all of it shifted to the background.

“You can kill him!” I yelled, putting the image of Erik of spiking a lead pipe through Shaw’s head. As long as I kept him immobile, it was the only thing I could think of to stop him, destroying what made his ability work.

After all, I knew it was a thing that would kill me.

I felt the metal pipe impale Shaw as through it were going through my own head. At least, there was pain and a thudding, empty absence of pain. A shock coursing through my body and an explosion of electric lights. I closed my eyes for a moment and thought I saw all the neon lights and billboards of Manhattan.

Distantly I was aware of a roaring sound and my name being shouted. In a swift movement, the whole world lurched to the side. I felt like I was being beaten with sticks. I touched my forehead, or someone else did, or someone else touched their forehead, and saw a hand covered in blood. I didn’t know whose it was, but it made me feel weak and nauseous.

Something was swaying, swaddling me in cotton. Then the world grayed at the edges and fell away.

The next time I awoke I was surprised simply to do so. I was in a white hospital bed. I felt like I’d been in a car wreck, pained from every angle and wrung out like a sponge.

I cast my mind out to feel for Erik as far as it would reach, feeling thousands of minds in pain and in health, and themselves searching, searching, searching, but was unsurprised to find him nowhere. I pleaded and pleaded, but felt and found nothing. Then I fell into unconsciousness again.

When I woke the second time I was still in the same hospital room, but it was dark. There was only a far-off light from the hallway dimly illuminating the room.

I could feel Erik sitting tensely across from me, but I couldn’t see him.

I rushed to sit up and speak, but only croaked instead, falling back into the bed feeling sick. My head felt like a rotten melon. I had to pull back my natural desire to reach out to him. It hurt too much. The result made me feel empty and small.

After a long silence, Erik said, his voice cracked like tree roots, “You lied to me.”

I nodded, but I didn’t know if I spoke.

“You were working for the government. Hunting down other mutants.”

“Shaw,” I finally choked out. The sound came painfully from my throat. I didn’t recall my injury from being thrown so bad, but it was certainly catching up to me. “They were trying to arrest Shaw.”

“How long do you think they were going to wait to ask you to hunt down other mutants, huh? In the name of justice. So they could track us all down and put us on convenient lists when they need to make arrests.”

“Erik,” was all I could say. I was exhausted. I didn’t have any argument. Not one that we hadn’t done before.

After another long silence, Erik said, “They know about us now. Or at least the papers are talking about it. Talking to scientists who say they have proof people with extraordinary abilities exist. Surprisingly, there were some witnesses to a massive building fire and gunfight in Manhattan. Some of the agents in your little secret government group talked about their mutant fighting initiative and the mutant telepath they had on their side.”

Erik’s voice was dripping with bitterness.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I’m sorry.” I reached out for him with my hand, hoping he’d come near over the bed, but he didn’t.

He laughed or choked some angry sound. “Did you ever… Was it some ruse? Did you plan on seducing me to get information on Shaw?”

“No!” Tears came hard to my eyes. I tried to reach out with my mind but was only met with a fearsome anger too hot to touch. “I would never. How could you think that?”

I could hear Erik pull in a wet sound, crying. “I don’t know anymore, Charles. You used your ability against other mutants. I don’t know. You’ve been lying to me since the moment I met you. You could have just… dismissed me. You insisted on being friends with me. You took me into your life. Why?”

I had to calm the ragged heaving in my chest. My throat felt so tight I didn’t think I could get any sounds out.

“I didn’t mean… I didn’t mean to fall in love with you. I only wanted to help you.

“Help,” Erik said, but the sound was dark and dangerous.

“I saw the good in you, Erik. I didn’t want to see you killed or arrested. I wanted to help you. Then I fell in love with you. I couldn’t let you go.”

“The raid.” Erik’s voice was increasingly cold. “Your sudden need to be alone with me. You were performing all along.”

It felt like a great chasm of volcanic air had opened up in my chest. His words were more painful than words had ever been. It was difficult, keeping myself from sobbing. “That wasn’t a lie, Erik. That was what I wanted. Always. To leave this awful lie and live with you. To be your husband.”

“Don’t,” Erik shouted, but stopped himself. “Don’t lie to me.”

A wave of dizzying sadness washed over me, my vision clouding out. “I’m not. I swear I’m not. I love you. I did everything I did to keep you safe. I only… I needed to keep you safe. Please, Erik. Please look at me.”

There was a long, tense, and still quiet.

Almost too softly to hear, Erik rose to his feet and said, “No. I can’t.”

I saw only a glimpse of his shadowed profile as he walked swiftly out the door. 

 

_“Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely night dreaming of a song. The melody haunts my reverie, and I am once again with you.”_

An Incomplete Collection of Unsent Letters

 

_December 20th, 1929_

My Darling Erik,

I feel foolish starting an imaginary correspondence, but I don’t feel as though I have the nerve to send you my thoughts. The most daring thing I can do nowadays is inquire how you’re doing in my letters to Raven. She will respond with the truth—that you’re angry and betrayed. There I lose myself. I did that to you.

So I find myself incapable of writing to you directly. Even if I did, I doubt you would respond. You have no reason to respond. I don’t blame you for hating me. But if I do not talk to you somehow, even in pretend, I feel like I might go mad.

It’s only that some days are so dark and empty now. I want to say it is the new pace of the world. I want to say it’s how the next decade looms for us darkly, rather than gleams with awaiting cheer and gaiety. It is a sensation that seems to have spread across the City. For some time I thought it was only me projecting my feelings, one way or another, but it’s been a consensus. Things are bad all around. While the dim prospects for the nation bother me, that isn’t what keeps me up at night. It isn’t the market crash that fills me with melancholy.

This creeping, unshakable sadness is, of course, because of your absence.

For the first two weeks after you left the hospital I was bereft. I was frantic. I scattered my mind as far as I could reach, searching for you. It didn’t take long to feel anger, to wonder to the sky why you simply couldn’t forgive me. To wonder why you wouldn’t show me your face. Then, of course, you and Raven left for Chicago on your glorious mission to unite all mutants. I was furious.

I felt you once with Cerebro. I felt your rage and your rejection. I wanted to argue. I wanted to explain again, explain better. But explain what?

I worked for the Bureau before I met you, hoping to use my abilities to help the world rather than just intrude. If I had a start-over, I would do everything differently, but that’s as useful as wishing upon a star. Life is the way it is. The only way to change things is accept them and move forward.

So now I have your wrath, instead of your love.

I wonder what would happen if I spoke to you. Actually spoke to you, or actually wrote to you. Is your wrath still the volatile thing it was when you left the hospital? My instinct is to think it must be.

You have always burned. There’s an old saying: “love is friendship set on fire.” I feel inside me that is the truth. I remember how you inflamed me. I remember doing dangerous things just to keep you, but not the simplest, just so I could feed that fire. So I believe in the fire. Because we lived in that passion and it ate us up.

Now all that’s left is the memory of warmth.

Yours forever, lamentably,  
Charles

 

~~_January 8th, 1930_ ~~

~~Charles,~~

~~Last week was our anniversary~~

~~I can’t stop thinking of how you touched me that night~~

 

_February 9th, 1930_

Darling Erik,

I think I hate you. Some days, at least, I do.

I haven’t heard from Raven for weeks. The last thing I heard from Hank was that you were responsible for that strike in Detroit and the police were called in. I know there were injuries, but I’ve heard nothing of deaths, so I’ll be grateful for that at least.

You’re so reckless and sure that you and you alone are right. Other people are going to get hurt. You are going to get hurt. Yet you think nothing of that. You could never get it through your fat head that other people care about you and want to see you well.

Is this punishment for treating you poorly? Are you trying to get my attention?

More likely you want nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t want to think about me either. I try not to think about you, but fail frequently. Constantly. I made an earnest effort to have a relationship with a woman. You would have hated her, no doubt. All I could do was think of the ring on my finger.

It lasted three days.

So I suppose the real trouble is wishing I could hate you. Like in most other things, I fall rather short of that as well.

Yours forever, still,  
Charles

 

~~_May 3th, 1930_ ~~

~~Dear Charles,~~

~~I still like to think of us watching the buildings go up downtown~~

~~I hate you~~

~~I miss you~~

 

_July 17th, 1930_

My Dearest Most Darling Erik,

The more I write these letters to you the more I miss you and hate you simultaneously. Yet the only reason I hate you is because you stubbornly refuse to forgive me.

I suppose you might forgive me if I were to ask you. I doubt it. If you must know, I don’t think I rather care much anymore to run through these obstacle courses you set me for forgiveness. Of course, you haven’t spoken to me directly. Nor have I. ~~And those are things I’m imagining, as that is how we communicate now.~~

I am drunk. Not nearly as drunk as I used to be, but it’s the first time since you left. A man from the shelter gave it to me in thanks. Because I’m helpful. He said I was the best volunteer. I brought milk for his cat and cleaned her eyes and no one else would let her in.

Do you see? Some people appreciate me.

By the way, I have a cat now. She’s awful and scratches me all the time. I named her Erik. You would love her, you prick.

 

_September 6th, 1930_

Charles,

Raven has informed me that you have been talking about starting a preparatory school for mutants. I think that is a very worthwhile idea. I would like to be involved in any effort to help the community in such a way.

 ~~I know we ended things difficultly. I do believe you were sincere in your emotions, even if you behaved like a cunt.~~ We have a great many differences in our approaches in helping the mutants among us, but the idea of a children’s school is one that could supply immeasurable good. The children deserve to come into their abilities without fear and the threat of ostracism. A school for mutants would be a wonderful thing. I wish I had thought of the idea.

I would like to help, but we would need to discuss your goals and hopes for this endeavor. We would need to discuss how your good intentions turn into terrible results that ruin my life.

 

_September 6th, 1930_

Dear Charles,

Raven has informed me that you have been talking about starting a preparatory school for mutants. This is a very worthwhile idea. A school for mutants could supply immeasurable good. It would provide a place for children to come into their abilities without fear and the threat of ostracism. It would also show to humans that mutant society is advancing. If there is any way I could help to be a part of this endeavor

~~I don’t have to ask you for anything.~~

 

_September 6th, 1930_

Dear Charles,

Sometimes it seems as though you were a dream in my life. What kind of phantasm were you, running into my life with a flash of power and happiness, only to leave as quickly as you came in? Why did you make me fall in love with you and break my heart? Why are you still here inside of me? Why can’t I move on from you?

You are the only thing I’ve ever known that has made me feel joy. I hate that I still want you. I got along fine before I met you, but now that you’re gone I’m no longer the same man. I am half awake. I am half alive without you.

I understand now why you lied to me for so long and why you kept trying to keep me in your little cottage in Long Island. I’m doing what I wanted now. Raven and I are making a name for ourselves, publishing our little magazine and speaking at union meetings. Without you by my side to argue with me calm me down it all seems like some routine. I throw myself into the work, but it isn’t satisfying. And it’s only because of you I know what satisfying feels like.

I want you back. Though I don’t know if I’m ready to have you back.

I will love you until I am nothing but bones.

Your beloved,  
Max

 

_October 19th, 1930_

Do you still wear your ring? Are you still mine? When can I be yours again?

 

_“What have we given?_  
My friend, blood shaking my heart,  
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender  
Which an age of prudence can never retract  
By this, and this only, we have existed.”

_January 2nd, 1931_

 

I stared at the letter in my hands in astonishment.

When I had opened the door to answer an early knock that morning, I hadn’t been expecting Erik. He appeared like a spectre. I half thought I was only putting his face there, like I had a million times since he left. Then he handed me a reply to the letter I’d given him through Raven.

Even though it had only been a year and half since we last saw each other, he looked older and tired. He was as thin and wiry as ever. His suit was more relaxed, a dull dark grey with a black waistcoat not meant for someone as trim as him. He had let a beard grow in, ginger and slightly manic. It made him look a little savage. And he had only a few strands of white hair growing in at his temples. I doubted anyone other than me might have noticed.

Seeing him felt like a weight being lifted from my chest. I breathed for the first time in years.

He looked at me nervously, his eyes grey and wary, and put an envelope bearing my name in my hands. It had the day’s date and a declaration of feelings I had never hoped to read in script. He waited while I read it. It was short, but honest. And all that mattered were a few simple words: _I forgive you. I love you. I need you back with me. Your beloved, Max._

My voice creaked with all the countless things that needed to be said. I didn’t know what to say. It all came rushing out of me in the chaos of my emotion.

“Oh, Erik, I couldn’t—I’ve thought of nothing but you—I’m so sorry—Please, I can’t—“

He touched my shoulder and squeezed.

“We don’t,” he said, unable to finish his sentence.

I nodded. He was right. We didn’t need to speak.

When I looked at him again, he took off his hat and held out a hand. Asking without asking. We were both wearing the rings we had worn for our improvised marriage. There were thousands upon thousands of things to say. There were countless arguments we had left to finish. There was so much to plan for in the possibility of truly making a school for young people with our abilities. Erik and would undoubtedly disagree over everything. Nothing was really resolved. There would be so many things to fix, and time to make up for.

But there would be time for that later.

I took my husband’s hand and led him inside, out of the cold. He responded into the touch like we had never been separated, and had never missed any time to touch any day of our lives.

He began to hum a quiet tune and said under his breath, “Nothing but blue skies, from now on.”

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I can recommend a [Josephine Baker performance of "Blue Skies"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUdUk0EjTEo). 
> 
> Here is a list of all [the quotes in the fic](http://jabletown.tumblr.com/post/38556872761/quotes-for-1920s-30s-au), attributed to their speakers/writers. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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